Setting aside all exaggerations, who does not recognise in the foregoing quotations “the galled jade wincing”?  Were the writer a kind owner of slaves, he might have replied to Uncle Tom’s Cabin by facts of habitual kindness to them, sufficient to prove that the authoress had entered into the region of romance; but in his recrimination he unconsciously displays the cloven hoof, and leaves no doubt on the mind that he writes under the impulse of a bitterly-accusing monitor within.  It would be wasting time to point out the difference between a system which binds millions of its people in bondage to their fellow-man, a master’s sovereign will their only practical protection, and a system which not only makes all its subjects equal in the eye of the law, and free to seek their fortunes wherever they list, but which is for ever striving to mitigate the distress that is invariably attendant upon an overcrowded population.  Even granting that his assertions were not only true, but that they were entirely produced by tyrannical enactments, what justification would England’s sins be for America’s crimes?  Suppose the House of Commons and the Lords Temporal and Spiritual obtained the royal sanction to an act for kidnapping boys and grilling them daily for a table-d’hote in their respective legislative assemblies, would such an atrocity—­or any worse atrocity, if such be possible—­in any respect alter the question of right and wrong between master and slave?  Let any charge of cruelty or injustice in England be advanced on its own simple grounds, and, wherever it comes from, it will find plenty of people, I am proud and happy to say, ready to inquire into it and to work hard for its removal; but when it comes in the shape of recrimination, who can fail to recognise an accusing conscience striving to throw the cloak of other people’s sins over the abominations which that conscience is ever ringing in the writer’s ears at home.

I must, however, state that, in speaking of the sufferings or injuries to which the slave is liable, I am not proclaiming them merely on the authority of Northern abolitionists, or on the deductions which I have drawn from human nature; many travellers have made similar charges.  Miss Bremer writes:—­“I beheld the old slave hunted to death because he dared to visit his wife—­beheld him mangled, beaten, recaptured, fling himself into the water of the Black River, over which he was retaken into the power of his hard master—­and the law was silent.  I beheld a young woman struck, for a hasty word, upon the temples, so that she fell down dead!—­and the law was silent.  I heard the law, through its jury, adjudicate between a white man and a black, and sentence the latter to be flogged when the former was guilty—­and they who were honest among the jurymen in vain opposed the verdict.  I beheld here on the shores of the Mississippi, only a few months since, a young negro girl fly from the maltreatment of her master, and he was a professor of religion, and fling herself into the river.”—­Homes of the New World. Would Miss Bremer write these things for the press, as occurring under her own eye, if they were not true?