"The sky was obscured by the smoke of hundreds of small chimneys and vast edifices, stretching in lines for miles and miles. The latter were crowded with women and children, young in years, but withered in form and feature. The countenances of the men were as colourless as the white fabric in their looms; their eyes sparkled with intelligence, but it was chiefly the intelligence of suffering, of privation, of keen sense of wrong, of inability to be better, of rankling hatred against existing institutions, and a furtive wish that some hideous calamity would bury them all in one common, undistinguishable ruin.
"'Are these the people? groaned the Queen, as the cold damp of more than mortal agony moistened her marble forehead.
"'Not all of them!" sounded the voice in her ear, so sharply that her Majesty looked up eagerly, and saw written, in letters of fire, on the palace wall:—
"'1. Every twelfth person in your dominions is a pauper, daily receiving parochial relief.
"'2. Every twentieth person in your dominions is a destitute wanderer, with no roof but the sky—no home but a prison. They are the Ishmaelites of modern society; every one's hand is against them, and their hands are against every one.
"'3. There are in Freeland 10,743,747 females; divide that number by 500,000, and you will find that every twentieth woman in your dominions is—Oh! horror piled on horror!--a harlot!'"
Then follows the scene of a disconsolate female throwing herself over a bridge, the whole winding up with this charming piece of information, addressed by the genius to her Majesty:—
"In your own land, liberty, the absence of which in another is deplored, is, in its most god-like development, but a name—unless that may be termed liberty which practically is but vulgar license—license to work from rosy morn to dark midnight for the most scanty pittances—license to store up wealth in the hands and for the benefit of the few—license to bellow lustily for rival politicians—license to send children to ragged schools—license to sot in the ale-house—license to grow lumpish and brutal—license to neglect the offices of religion, to swear, to lie, to blaspheme—license to steal, to pander unchecked to the coarsest appetites, to fawn and slaver over the little great ones of the earth—license to creep like a worm through life, or bound through it like a wild beast; and, last and most precious of all—for it is untaxed—license to starve, to rot, to die, and be buried in a foetid pauper's grave, on which the sweet-smelling flowers, sent to strew the pathway of man and woman with beauty, love, and hope, will refuse to grow, much less bloom."
Setting aside all exaggerations, who does not recognise in the foregoing quotations "the galled jade wincing"? Were the writer a kind owner of slaves, he might have replied to Uncle Tom's Cabin by facts of habitual kindness to them, sufficient to prove that the authoress had entered into the region of romance; but in his recrimination he unconsciously displays the cloven hoof, and leaves no doubt on the mind that he writes under the impulse of a bitterly-accusing monitor within. It would be wasting time to point out the difference between a system which binds millions of its people in bondage to their fellow-man, a master's sovereign will their only practical protection, and a system which not only makes all its subjects equal in the eye of the law, and free to seek their fortunes wherever they list, but which is for ever striving to mitigate the distress that is invariably attendant upon an overcrowded population. Even granting that his assertions were not only true, but that they were entirely produced by tyrannical enactments, what justification would England's sins be for America's crimes? Suppose the House of Commons and the Lords Temporal and Spiritual obtained the royal sanction to an act for kidnapping boys and grilling them daily for a table-d'hôte in their respective legislative assemblies, would such an atrocity—or any worse atrocity, if such be possible—in any respect alter the question of right and wrong between master and slave? Let any charge of cruelty or injustice in England be advanced on its own simple grounds, and, wherever it comes from, it will find plenty of people, I am proud and happy to say, ready to inquire into it and to work hard for its removal; but when it comes in the shape of recrimination, who can fail to recognise an accusing conscience striving to throw the cloak of other people's sins over the abominations which that conscience is ever ringing in the writer's ears at home.
I must, however, state that, in speaking of the sufferings or injuries to which the slave is liable, I am not proclaiming them merely on the authority of Northern abolitionists, or on the deductions which I have drawn from human nature; many travellers have made similar charges. Miss Bremer writes:—"I beheld the old slave hunted to death because he dared to visit his wife—beheld him mangled, beaten, recaptured, fling himself into the water of the Black River, over which he was retaken into the power of his hard master—and the law was silent. I beheld a young woman struck, for a hasty word, upon the temples, so that she fell down dead!--and the law was silent. I heard the law, through its jury, adjudicate between a white man and a black, and sentence the latter to be flogged when the former was guilty—and they who were honest among the jurymen in vain opposed the verdict. I beheld here on the shores of the Mississippi, only a few months since, a young negro girl fly from the maltreatment of her master, and he was a professor of religion, and fling herself into the river."—Homes of the New World. Would Miss Bremer write these things for the press, as occurring under her own eye, if they were not true?