color, etc., with the shameless precision that marks the entire document, are given) to attend upon his brutal pleasure, and she silently remaining away, he writes,—­“Next morning ordered her a dozen lashes for disobedience."[7] For disobedience, observe!  She had been “hired for life”; the great Carlyle had witnessed the bargain; and behold, she has broken the contract!  She must be punished; Mr. Carlyle and his co-cultivator of the virtue of obedience (par nobile fratrum) will see to it that she is duly punished.  She shall go to the whipping-post, this disobedient virgin; she shall have twelve lashes, (for the Chelsea gods are severe, and know the use of “beneficent whip,")—­twelve lashes on the naked person,—­blows with the terrible slave-whip, beneath which the skin purples in long, winding lines, then breaks and gushes into spirts of red blood, and afterwards cicatrizes into perpetual scars; for disobedience is an immorality not to be overlooked!

Yes, Thomas Carlyle, I hold you a party to these crimes. You, YOU are the brutal old man who would flog virgins into prostitution.  You approve the system; you volunteer your best varnish in its commendation; and this is an inseparable and legal part of it.  Legal, I say,—­legal, and not destructive of respectability.  That is the point.  In ordering such lashes, that ancient miscreant (for old he already was) neither violated any syllable of the slave-code, nor forfeited his social position.  He was punishing “disobedience”; he was admministering “justice”; he was illustrating the “rights of property”; he was using the lawful “privileges of gentlemen.”

No doubt, deeds of equal infamy are done in the dens of New York.  But in New York they are infamous.  In New York they are indeed done in dens, by felons who flee the eye of the policeman,—­unless, to be sure, the police have been appointed by a certain alter ego of yours in negro-hatred, whilom chief magistrate and disgrace of that unfortunate city.  But under your life-service regime things are managed in a more enlightened way.  There they who have liberty—­and sometimes use the liberty—­to torture women into beastly submissions, do not hide from the laws, they make the laws.  There such a personage as the one mentioned may be a gentleman, a man of high standing,” one of the most respectable men in the State” (Florida).

And this, just this,—­for surely you will not be a coward, and dodge consequences,—­you name a scheme of life-hire.  This you esteem so much superior to our democratic way of holding each man and woman to be the shrine of rights which have an infinite sanctity, and of adjudging it the chief duty of the State to annex to these rights the requisite force for their practical assertion.