these were realities.  The Southern people, in the phrase of President Wilson, “knew that their lives were honourable, their relations with their slaves humane, their responsibility for the existence of slavery amongst them remote”; they burned with indignation when the whole South was held responsible for the occasional abuses of slavery.  But the harsh philanthropist, who denounced them indiscriminately, merely dwelt on those aspects of slavery which came to his knowledge or which he actually saw on the border line.  And the occasional abuses, however occasional, were made by the deliberate choice of Southern statesmanship an essential part of the institution.  Honourable and humane men in the South scorned exceedingly the slave hunter and the slave dealer.  A candid slave owner, discussing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” found one detail flagrantly unfair; the ruined master would have had to sell his slaves to the brute, Legree, but for the world he would not have shaken hands with him.  “Your children,” exclaimed Lincoln, “may play with the little black children, but they must not play with his”—­the slave dealer’s, or the slave driver’s, or the slave hunter’s.  By that fact alone, as he bitingly but unanswerably insisted, the whole decent society of the South condemned the foundation on which it rested.

It is needless to discuss just how dark or how fair American slavery in its working should be painted.  The moderate conclusions which are quite sufficient for our purpose are uncontested.  First, this much must certainly be conceded to those who would defend the slave system, that in the case of the average slave it was very doubtful whether his happiness (apart from that of future generations) could be increased by suddenly turning him into a free man working for a wage; justice would certainly have demanded that the change should be accompanied by other provisions for his benefit.  But, secondly, on the refractory negro, more vicious, or sometimes, one may suspect, more manly than his fellows, the system was likely to act barbarously.  Thirdly, every slave family was exposed to the risk, on such occasions as the death or great impoverishment of its owner, of being ruthlessly torn asunder, and the fact that negroes often rebounded or seemed to rebound from sorrows of this sort with surprising levity does not much lessen the horror of it.  Fourthly, it is inherent in slavery that its burden should be most felt precisely by the best minds and strongest characters among the slaves.  And, though the capacity of the negroes for advancement could not then and cannot yet be truly measured, yet it existed, and the policy of the South shut the door upon it.  Lastly, the system abounded in brutalising influences upon a large number of white people who were accessory to it, and notoriously it degraded the poor or “mean whites,” for whom it left no industrial opening, and among whom it caused work to be despised.