for the spiritual training of our African fellow-creatures.  The affection of “Mammy” for “Massa and Missis” was something unknown where hired labor prevailed.  Graver voices took up the burden of the song.  There was no pauperism in a slave-country.  There were no prostitutes.  It had its disadvantages, certainly; but what form of society, what system of labor has not?  Besides, here it was.  It was the interest of slaveholders to be kind.  And what a blessing to bring the poor heathen from benighted Africa and pagan servitude to the ennobling influences of Slavery, as practised among Southwestern Christians in America, and “professors” in South Carolina and Georgia!  See the Reverend Mr. Adams and Miss Murray passim.  This was the answer made to the statements of the actual facts of the system, when it was found that the question had gone before public opinion, and would be decided upon its merits by that tribunal, all the panders, bullies, assassins, apologists, and chaplains of Slavery to the contrary notwithstanding.  In fact, when that was once clearly perceived, the issue was no less visible; only whether it were to be reached by war or peace was not so plain.

Yet in all this tremendous debate which resounds through the last thirty years of our history, rising and swelling until every other sound was lost in its imperious roar, one decisive voice was silent.  It was precisely that which is heard in this book.  General statements, harrowing details from those who had been slaveholders, and who had renounced Slavery, were sometimes made public.  Indeed, the most cruel and necessary incidents, the hunting with blood-hounds, the branding, the maiming, the roasting, the whipping of pregnant women, could not be kept from knowledge.  They blazed into print.  But the public, hundreds of miles away, while it sighed and shuddered a little, resolved that such atrocities were exceptional.  ’Twas a shocking pity, to be sure!  Poor things!  Women, too!  Tut, tut!

Now, at last, we have no general statement, no single, sickening incident, but the diary of the mistress of plantations of seven hundred slaves, living under the most favorable circumstances, upon the islands at the mouth of the Altamaha River, in Georgia.  It is a journal, kept from day to day, of the actual ordinary life of the plantation, where the slaves belonged to educated, intelligent, and what are called the most respectable people,—­not persons imbruted by exile among slaves upon solitary islands, but who had lived in large Northern cities and the most accomplished society, subject to all the influences of the highest civilization.  It is the journal of a hearty, generous, clear-sighted woman, who went to the plantation, loving the master, and believing, that, though Slavery might be sad, it might also be mitigated, and the slave might be content.  It is the record of ghastly undeceiving,—­of the details of a system so wantonly, brutally, damnably unjust, inhuman, and degrading, that it blights the