But to return.  The South expected to fool the North into a compliance with its designs, by availing itself of the divisions among its professed opponents, and by dazzling away the attention of the people from the real nature of the wickedness to be perpetrated.  Slavery was to be extended, and the North was to be an accomplice in the business; but the Slave Power did not expect that we should be active and enthusiastic in this work of self-degradation.  It did not ask us to extend Slavery, but simply to allow its extension to occur; and in this appeal to our moral timidity and moral laziness, it contemptuously tossed us a few fig-leaves of fallacy and false statement to save appearances.

We were informed, for instance, that by the equality of men is meant the equality of those whom Providence has made equal.  But this is exactly the sense in which no sane man ever understood the doctrine of equality; for Providence has palpably made men unequal, white men as well as black.

Then we were told that the white and black races could dwell together only in the relation of masters and slaves,—­and, in the same breath, that in this relation the slaves were steadily advancing in civilization and Christianity.  But, if steadily advancing in civilization and Christianity, the time must inevitably come when they would not submit to be slaves; and then what becomes of the statement that the white and black races cannot dwell together as freemen?  Why boast of their improvement, when you are improving them only that you may exterminate them, or they you?

Then, with a composure of face which touches the exquisite in effrontery, we were assured that this antithesis of master and slave, of tyrant and abject natures, is really a perfect harmony.  Slavery—­so said these logicians of liberticide—­has solved the great social problem of the working-classes, comfortably for capital, happily for labor; and has effected this by an ingenious expedient which could have occurred only to minds of the greatest depth and comprehension, the expedient, namely, of enslaving labor.  Now doubtless there has always been a struggle between employers and employed, and this struggle will probably continue until the relations between the two are more humane and Christian.  But Slavery exhibits this struggle in its earliest and most savage stage, a stage answering to the rude energies and still ruder conceptions of barbarians.  The issue of the struggle, it is plain, will not be that capital will own labor, but that labor will own capital, and no man be owned.

Still we were vehemently told, that, though the slaves, for their own good, were deprived of their rights as men, they were in a fine state of physical comfort.  This was not and could not be true; but even if it were, it only represented the slaveholder as addressing his slave in some such words of derisive scorn as Byron hurls at Duke Alphonso,—­

“Thou! born to eat, and be despised, and die, Even as the brutes that perish,”—­