You have spoken ill of a certain sort of German metaphysic; but I perceive that you have now become a convert to it.  The final arcanum of that, I think, is, Something = Nothing.  You give this abstraction a concrete form; your axiom is, No Hire = Hire for Life.  To deny that laborers have any property in their own toil, and to allow them their poor peck of maize and pound of bacon per week, not at all as a wage for their work, but solely as a means of converting corn into cotton, and cotton into seats in Congress and summers at Saratoga,—­that, according to the Chelsea metaphysic, is “hiring them for life”!  To deny laborers any legal status as persons, and any social status as human souls,—­to give them fodder for food, and pens for homes,—­to withhold from them the school, the table, and the sanctities of marriage,—­if that is not “hiring them for life,” what is it?  To affirm, by consistent practice, that no spiritual, no human value appertains to the life of laboring men and women,—­to rate them in their very persons as commercial values, measuring the virtue of their existence with coin, as cloths are measured with a yardstick,—­this, we all see, is “hiring them for life”!  To take from women the LEGAL RIGHT to be chaste,—­to make it a capital offence for a woman of the laboring caste to defend her own person by blows, for any “husband” or father of the laboring caste to defend wife or daughter with blows, against the lust of another caste, and, having made them thus helpless before outrage, to close the judicial tribunals against their testimony, and refuse them the faintest show of redress,—­truly, it is very kind of you to let us know that this is the simplest piece of “hiring for life,” for without that charitable assistance the fact would surely have eluded our discovery.  How could we have found it out without your assistance, when, after that aid has been rendered, the fact continues to seem so utterly otherwise as to reflect even upon your generous information the colors of an unexampled untruth?

No-Hire + Dehumanization of the Laborer = Life-Hire?  We never should have dreamt of it!

Within the past year, a document has come into my hands which they may thank their stars who are not required to see.  It is the private diary of a most eminent and respectable slaveholder, recently dead.  The chances of war threw it into the hands of our troops, and the virtue of a noble surgeon rescued it from defiling uses, and sent it to me, as one whose duty bound him to know the worst.  Of its authenticity there is not a shadow of question.  And such a record of pollution,—­of wallowing, to which the foulness of swine is as the life of honey-bees harboring in the bosoms of roses,—­I deliberately suppose can never have got into black and white before.  Save in general terms, I can hardly speak of it; but one item I must have the courage to suggest more definitely.  Having bidden a young slave-girl (whose name, age,