opens the door of her room, and beholds her husband, with his arms folded, advising his slave “not to make a fuss about what there is no help for.”  The same master insists that there is no hardship or injustice in whipping a woman who asks his wife to intercede for her, but confesses that it is “disagreeable.”  At last he tells her that she must no longer fatigue him with the “stuff” and “trash” which “the niggers,” who are “all d——­d liars,” make her believe, and henceforward closes his ears to all complaint.

Yet this was a model plantation, and this was probably not a hard master, as masters go.  “These are the conditions which can only be known to one who lives among them.  Flagrant acts of cruelty may be rare, but this ineffable state of utter degradation, this really beastly existence, is the normal condition of these men and women; and of that no one seems to take heed, nor had I ever heard it described so as to form any adequate conception of it, till I found myself plunged into it....  Industry, man’s crown of honor elsewhere, is here his badge of utter degradation; and so comes all by which I am here surrounded,—­pride, profligacy, idleness, cruelty, cowardice, ignorance, squalor, dirt, and ineffable abasement.”

And yet this is the system which we have been in the habit of calling patriarchal, because the model masters said it was so, and trade was too prosperous to allow any difference with them!  And these are the model masters, supported in luxury by all this unpaid labor and untold woe, these women-whippers and breeders of babies for sale, who have figured in our talk and imaginations as “the chivalry” and “gentlemen”!  These are they to whom American society has koo-too’d, and in whose presence it has been ill-bred and uncourteous to say that every man has rights, that every laborer is worthy of his hire, that injustice is unjust, and uncleanness foul.  No wonder that Russell, coming to New York, and finding the rich men and the political confederates of the conspirators declaring that the Government of the United States could not help itself, and that they would allow no interference with their Southern friends, sincerely believed what he wished to, and wrote to John Bull, whose round face was red with eager desire to hear it, that the Revolution was virtually accomplished.  No wonder that the haughty slaveholders, smeared with sycophantic slime, at Newport, at Saratoga, in the “polite” and “conservative” Northern circles, believed what Mr. Hunter of Virginia told a Massachusetts delegate to the Peace Congress,—­that there would be no serious trouble, and that the Montgomery Constitution would be readily adopted by the “conservative” sentiment of the North.

Mrs. Kemble’s book shows what the miserable magic is that enchants these Southern American citizens into people whose philosophy of society would disgrace the Dark Ages, and whose social system is that of Dahomey.