approaches it prepossesses them, far more than is reasonable.  The Southerners are infinitely better bred men, according to English notions, than the men of the Northern States.  The habit of command gives them a certain self-possession, the enjoyment of leisure a certain ease.  Their temperament is impulsive and enthusiastic, and their manners have the grace and spirit which seldom belong to the deportment of a Northern people; but upon more familiar acquaintance, the vices of the social system to which they belong will be found to have infected them with their own peculiar taint; and haughty overbearing irritability, effeminate indolence, reckless extravagance, and a union of profligacy and cruelty, which is the immediate result of their irresponsible power over their dependents, are some of the less pleasing traits which acquaintance developes in a Southern character.  In spite of all this, there is no manner of doubt that the ‘candid English observer’ will, for the season of his sojourning among them, greatly prefer their intercourse to that of their Northern brethren.  Moreover, without in the least suspecting it, he will be bribed insidiously and incessantly by the extreme desire and endeavour to please and prepossess him which the whole white population of the slave States will exhibit—­as long as he goes only as a ‘candid observer,’ with a mind not yet made up upon the subject of slavery, and open to conviction as to its virtues.  Every conciliating demonstration of courtesy and hospitable kindness will be extended to him, and, as I said before, if his observation is permitted (and it may even appear to be courted), it will be to a fairly bound purified edition of the black book of slavery, in which, though the inherent viciousness of the whole story cannot be suppressed, the coarser and more offensive passages will be carefully expunged.  And now, permit me to observe, that the remarks of your traveller must derive much of their value from the scene of his enquiry.  In Maryland, Kentucky, and Virginia, the outward aspect of slavery has ceased to wear its most deplorable features.  The remaining vitality of the system no longer resides in the interests, but in the pride and prejudices of the planters.  Their soil and climate are alike favourable to the labours of a white peasantry:  the slave cultivation has had time to prove itself there the destructive pest which, in time, it will prove itself wherever it prevails.  The vast estates and large fortunes that once maintained, and were maintained by, the serfdom of hundreds of negroes, have dwindled in size and sunk in value, till the slaves have become so heavy a burthen on the resources of the exhausted soil and impoverished owners of it, that they are made themselves objects of traffic in order to ward off the ruin that their increase would otherwise entail.  Thus, the plantations of the Northern slave States now present to the traveller very few of the darker and more oppressive peculiarities of the system; and, provided he does not stray too near the precincts where the negroes are sold, or come across gangs of them on their way to Georgia, Louisiana, or Alabama, he may, if he is a very superficial observer, conclude that the most prosperous slavery is not much worse than the most miserable freedom.