darkened her picture, without detracting from its perfect truth.  Even with respect to the incident of Tom’s death, it must not be said that if such an event is possible, it is hardly probable; for this is unfortunately not true.  It is not true that the value of the slave as property infallibly protects his life from the passions of his master.  It is no new thing for a man’s passions to blind him to his most obvious and immediate temporal interests, as well as to his higher and everlasting ones,—­in various parts of the world and stages of civilisation, various human passions assume successive prominence, and become developed, to the partial exclusion or deadening of others.  In savage existence, and those states of civilisation least removed from it, the animal passions predominate.  In highly cultivated modern society, where the complicated machinery of human existence is at once a perpetually renewed cause and effect of certain legal and moral restraints, which, in the shape of government and public opinion, protect the congregated lives and interests of men from the worst outrages of open violence, the natural selfishness of mankind assumes a different development; and the love of power, of pleasure, or of pelf, exhibits different phenomena from those elicited from a savage under the influence of the same passions.  The channel in which the energy and activity of modern society inclines more and more to pour itself, is the peaceful one of the pursuit of gain.  This is preeminently the case with the two great commercial nations of the earth, England and America;—­and in either England or the Northern States of America, the prudential and practical views of life prevail so far, that instances of men sacrificing their money interests at the instigation of rage, revenge, and hatred, will certainly not abound.  But the Southern slaveholders are a very different race of men from either Manchester manufacturers or Massachusetts merchants; they are a remnant of barbarism and feudalism, maintaining itself with infinite difficulty and danger by the side of the latest and most powerful developement of commercial civilisation.

The inhabitants of Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, whose estates lie like the suburban retreats of our city magnates in the near neighbourhood of their respective cities, are not now the people I refer to.  They are softened and enlightened by many influences,—­the action of city life itself, where human sympathy, and human respect, stimulated by neighbourhood, produce salutary social restraint, as well as less salutary social cowardice.  They travel to the Northern States, and to Europe; and Europe and the Northern States travel to them; and in spite of themselves, their peculiar conditions receive modifications from foreign intercourse.  The influence, too, of commercial enterprise, which, in these latter days, is becoming the agent of civilisation all over the earth, affects even the uncommercial residents of the Southern cities,