is one of war, and that there is no crime he may not be compelled to commit in self-defence.  Disdaining all cant, he clearly perceives that the system, in its practical working, must conform to the principles on which it is based.  He accordingly believes in the lash and the fear of the lash.  If he is cruel and brutal, it may as often be from policy as from disposition, for brutality and cruelty are the means by which weaker races are best kept “subordinated” to stronger races; and the influence of his brutality and cruelty is felt as restraint and terror on the plantation of his less resolute neighbor.  And when we speak of brutality and cruelty, we do not limit the application of the words to those who scourge, but extend it to some of those who preach,—­who hold up heaven as the reward of those slaves who are sufficiently abject on earth, and threaten damnation in the next world to all who dare to assert their manhood in this.

If, however, any one still doubts that this system develops itself logically and naturally, and tramples down the resistance offered by the better sentiments of human nature, let him look at the legislation which defines and protects it,—­a legislation which, as expressing the average sense and purpose of the community, is to be quoted as conclusive against the testimony of any of its individual members.  This legislation evinces the dominion of a malignant principle.  You can hear the crack of the whip and the clank of the chain in all its enactments.  Yet these laws, which cannot be read in any civilized country without mingled horror and derision, indicate a mastery of the whole theory and practice of oppression, are admirably adapted to the end they have in view, and bear the unmistakable marks of being the work of practical men,—­of men who know their sin, and “knowing, dare maintain.”  They do not, it is true, enrich the science of jurisprudence with any large or wise additions, but we do not look for such luxuries as justice, reason, and beneficence in ordinances devised to prop up iniquity, falsehood, and tyranny.  Ghastly caricatures of justice as these offshoots of Slavery are, they are still dictated by the nature and necessities of the system.  They have the flavor of the rank soil whence they spring.

If we desire any stronger evidence that slaveholders constitute a general Slave Power, that this Slave Power acts as a unit, the unity of a great interest impelled by powerful passions, and that the virtues of individual slaveholders have little effect in checking the vices of the system, we can find that evidence in the zeal and audacity with which this power engaged in extending its dominion.  Seemingly aggressive in this, it was really acting on the defensive,—­on the defensive, however, not against the assaults of men, but against the immutable decrees of God.  The world is so constituted, that wrong and oppression are not, in a large view, politic.  They heavily mortgage the future, when they glut the avarice of