admitted, so that those shipped are at the firmest period of life, the annual mortality is forty-three in a hundred. In vessels that sail from Bonny, Benin, and the Calabars, whence a large proportion of slaves are brought, this mortality is so much increased by various causes, that eighty-six in a hundred die yearly. He adds, "It is a destruction, which if general but for ten years, would depopulate the world, and extinguish the human race.

We next come to the influence of this diabolical system on the slave-owner; and here I shall be cautioned that I am treading on delicate ground, because our own country. men are slaveholders. But I am yet to learn that wickedness is any the better for being our own. Let the truth be spoken and let those abide its presence who can.

The following is the testimony of Jefferson, who had good opportunities for observation, and who certainly had no New-England prejudices: "There must, doubtless, be an unhappy influence on the manners of the people, produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole com.

merce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. The parent storms; the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in a circle of smaller slaves, gives loose to the worst of passions; and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy, who can retain his morals and manners undepraved in such circumstances."

In a community where all the labor is done by one class there inust of course be another class who live in indolence; and we all know how much people that have nothing to do are tempted by what the world calls pleasures; the result is, that slaveholding states and colonies are proverbial for dissipation. Hence, too, the contempt for industry, which prevails in such a state of society.—Where none work but slaves, usefulness becomes degradation. The wife of a respectable mechanic, who accompanied her husband from Massachusetts to the South, gave great offence to her new neighbors by performing her usual household avocations; they begged her to desist from it, (offering the services of their own blacks,) because the sight of a white person en

gaged in any labor was extremely injurious to the sims: they deemed it very important that the negres soolid be taught, both by precept and example, that they alice were made to work!

Whether the undue importance attached to merely er ternal gentility, and the increasing ten leary to do lore ant extravagance throughout this country, ought to be ammouted, in any degree, to the same source, I am

able to s if any influence comes to us from the example and zidov a the slaveholding states, it certainly must be the nature, There is another view of this system, wh

veil so completely as it ought to be. I shall be called bood for saying so much; but the facts are so im is a matter of consience not to be fastidiou

The negro woman is unprotected either by law se proble opinion. She is the property of her mister and b daughters are his property. They are allowed to tire conscientious scruples, no sense of shame, no regard Dr feelings of husband, or parent; they must be entrega servient to the will of their owner, on pain of being w as near unto death as will comport with his lareros to death, if it suit his pleasure.

Those who know human nature would be able to soc, atture the unavoidable result, even if it were not termynt og the amount of mixed population. Think bra monest v a degrading effect must be produced on the mora số bort blacks and whites by customs like these!

Considering we live in the nineteenth century,

a strange state of society where the father sa and the brother puts his sister up at auction things are often practised in our republic.

Doctor Walsh, in his account of Brazil, tells so asesina of one of these fathers, who love their offspring as mane price. “For many years," says he, himno kotlarn in slavery, and maintained the right to dispose of it to se de would of his mule. Being ill, however, and bear to die v made his will, left his child his freedom, and appreed om o it. Some time after he recovered, and having a 16.1 with the young man, he threatened to sell him with the re of his stock. The son, determined to prevent the la sinated his father in a wood, got possession of the an manded his freedom, and obtained it. This ami was perfectly well known in the neighborhood, but so pre

cess was instituted against him. He was not chargeable, as I could hear, with any other delinquency than the horrible one of murdering his father to obtain his freedom." This forms a fine picture of the effects of slavery upon human relations !*

I have more than once heard people, who had just returned from the South, speak of seeing a number of mulattoes in attendance where they visited, whose resemblance to the head of the family was too striking not to be immediately observed. What sort of feeling must be excited in the minds of those slaves by being constantly exposed to the tyranny or caprice of their own brothers and sisters, and by the knowledge that these near relations, will on a division of the estate, have power to sell them off with the cattle?

But the vices of white men eventually provide a scourge for themselves. They increase the negro race, but the negro can never increase theirs; and this is one great reason why the proportion of colored population is always so large in slaveholding countries. As the ratio increases more and more every year, the colored people must eventually be the stronger party; and when this result happens, slavery must either be abolished, or government must furnish troops, of whose wages the free states must pay their proportion.

As a proof of the effects of slavery on the temper, I will relate but very few anecdotes.

The first happened in the Bahamas. It is extracted from a despatch of Mr. Huskisson to the governor of those islands: "Henry and Helen Moss have been found guilty of a misdemeanor, for their cruelty to their slave Kate; and those facts of the case, which seem beyond dispute, appear to be as follows:

"Kate was a domestic slave, and is stated to have been guilty of theft: she is also accused of disobedience, in re. fusing to mend her clothes and do her work; and this was the more immediate cause of her punishment. On the twenty-second of July, eighteen hundred and twenty-six, she was confined in the stocks, and she was not released till the eighth of August following, being a period of seventeen

* A short time ago a reverend and very benevolent gentleman suggested as the subject of a book, The Beauty of Human Relations. What a bitter jest it would be, to send him this volume, with the innation that I had complied with his request!

days. The stocks were so constructed that she could not sit up or lie down at pleasure, and she remained in them night and day. During this period she was flogged repeatedly, one of the overseers thinks about six times; and red pepper was rubbed upon her eyes to prevent her sleeping. Tasks were given her, which, in the opinion of the same overseer, she was incapable of performing; sometimes because they were beyond her powers, at other times because she could not see to do them, on account of the pepper having been rubbed on her eyes; and she was flogged for failing to accomplish these tasks. A violent distemper had prevailed on the plantation during the summer. It is in evidence, that on one of the days of Kate's confinement, she complained of fe ver; and that one of the floggings she received was the day after she made the complaint. When she was taken out of the stocks, she appeared to be cramped, and was then again flogged. The very day of her release, she was sent to field labor, (though heretofore a house-servant;) and on the evening of the third day ensuing was brought before her owners, as being ill, and refusing to work; and she then again com plained of having fever. They were of opinion that she had none then, but gave directions to the driver, if she should be ill, to bring her to them for medicines in the morning. The driver took her to the negro-house, and again flogged her; though at this time apparently without orders from her owners to do so. In the morning at seven o'clock she was taken to work in the field, where she died at noon. "The facts of the case are thus far incontrovertibly es tablished; and I deeply lament, that, heinous as the offences are which this narrative exhibits, I can discover no material palliation of them amongst the other circumstances detailed in the evidence."

A bill of indictment for murder was preferred against Mr. and Mrs. Moss: the grand jury threw it out. Upon two other bills, for misdemeanors, a verdict of guilty was returned. Five months' imprisonment, and a fine of three hundred pounds, was the only punishment for this deliberate and shocking cruelty!

In the next chapter, it will be seen that similar misdemeanors are committed with equal impunity in this, country.

do not know how much odium Mr. and Mrs. Moss generally incurred in consequence of this transaction; but many of "the most respectable people in the island peti