This was one of the Southern infirmaries with which I was acquainted; and I beg to conclude this chapter of contrasts to your informant’s consolatory views of slavery, by assuring you once more very emphatically that they have been one and all drawn from estates where the slaves esteemed themselves well treated, were reputed generally to be so, and undoubtedly, as far as my observation went, were so, compared with those on several of the adjoining plantations.

With regard to the statement respecting the sums of money earned by industrious negroes, there is no doubt that it is perfectly correct.  I knew of some slaves on a plantation in the extreme South who had received, at various times, large sums of money from a shopkeeper in the small town near their estate, for the grey moss or lichen collected from the evergreen oaks of Carolina and Georgia, upon which it hangs in vast masses, and after some cleaning process becomes an excellent substitute for horse-hair, for bed, chair, and sofa-stuffing.  On another estate, some of the slaves were expert boat makers, and had been allowed by their masters to retain the price (no inconsiderable one) for some that they had found time to manufacture after their day’s labour was accomplished.  These were undoubtedly privileges, but I confess it appears to me that the juster view of the matter would be this—­if these men were industrious enough out of their scanty leisure to earn these sums of money, which a mere exercise of arbitrary will on the part of the master allowed them to keep, how much more of remuneration, of comfort, of improvement, physical and mental, might they not have achieved, had the due price of their daily labour merely been paid to them?  It seems to me that this is the mode of putting the case to Englishmen, and all who have not agreed to consider uncertain favour an equivalent for common justice in the dealings of man with man.  As the slaves are well known to toil for years sometimes to amass the means of rescuing themselves from bondage, the fact of their being able and sometimes allowed to earn considerable sums of money is notorious.  But now that I have answered one by one the instances you have produced, with others—­I am sure as accurate and I believe as common—­of an entirely opposite description, permit me to ask you what this sort of testimony amounts to.  I allow you full credit for yours, allow me full credit for mine, and the result is very simply a nullification of the one by the other statement, and a proof that there is as much good as evil in the details of slavery; but now, be pleased to throw into the scale this consideration, that the principle of the whole is unmitigated abominable evil, as by your own acknowledgement you hold it to be, and add, moreover, that the principle being invariably bad beyond the power of the best man acting under it to alter its execrable injustice, the goodness of the detail is a matter absolutely dependent upon the will of each individual slaveholder, so that though