his mind to William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison was a poor man who, like Franklin, had raised himself as a working printer, and was now occupied in philanthropy. Stirred up by Lundy, he succeeded after many painful experiences, in gaol and among mobs, in publishing in Boston on January 1, 1831, the first number of the Liberator. In it he said: "I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population. I will be as hard as truth and as uncompromising as justice. I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard." This was the beginning of the new Abolitionist movement. The Abolitionists, in the main, were impracticable people; Garrison in the end proved otherwise. Under the existing Constitution, they had nothing to propose but that the free States should withdraw from their covenant with death and agreement with hell"-in other words, from the Union,whereby they would not have liberated one slave. They included possibly too many of that sort who would seek salvation by repenting of other men's sins. But even these did not indulge this propensity at their ease, for by this time the politicians, the polite world, the mass of the people, the churches (even in Boston), not merely avoided the dangerous topic; they angrily proscribed it. The Abolitionists took their lives in their hands, and sometimes lost them. Only two men of standing helped them: Channing, the great preacher, who sacrificed thereby a fashionable congregation; and Adams, the sour, upright, able ex-President, the only ex-President who ever made for himself an after-career in Congress. In 1852 a still more potent ally came to their help, a poor lady, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who in that year published "Uncle Tom's Cabin," often said to have influenced opinion more than any other book of modern times. Broadly speaking, they accomplished two things. If they did not gain love in quarters where they might have looked for it, they gained the very valuable hatred of their enemies; for they goaded Southern politicians to fury and madness, of which the

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first symptom was their effort to suppress Abolitionist Petitions to Congress. But above all they educated in their labour of thirty years a school of opinion, not entirely in agreement with them but ready one day to revolt with decision from continued complicity in wrong.

6. Slavery and Southern Society.

In the midst of this growing America, a portion, by no means sharply marked off, and accustomed to the end to think itself intensely American, was distinguished by a peculiar institution. What was the character of that institution as it presented itself in 1830 and onwards?

Granting, as many slave holders did, though their leaders always denied it, that slavery originated in foul wrongs and rested legally upon a vile principle, what did it look like in its practical working? Most of us have received from two different sources two broad but vivid general impressions on this subject, which seem hard to reconcile but which are both in the main true. On the one hand, a visitor from England or the North, coming on a visit to the South, or in earlier days to the British West Indies, expecting perhaps to see all the horror of slavery at a glance, would be, as a young British officer once wrote home, wrote home, "most agreeably undeceived as to the situation of these poor people.' He would discern at once that a Southern gentleman had no more notion of using his legal privilege to be cruel to his slave than he himself had of overdriving his old horse. He might easily on the contrary find quite ordinary slave owners who had a very decided sense of responsibility in regard to their human chattels. Around his host's house, where the owner's children, petted by a black nurse, played with the little black children or with some beloved old negro, he might see. that pretty aspect of "our institution at the South,' which undoubtedly created in many young Southerners as they grew up a certain amount of genuine sentiment in favour of slavery. Riding wider afield he might be

struck, as General Sherman was, with the contentment of the negroes whom he met on the plantations. On enquiry he would learn that the slave in old age was sure of food and shelter and free from work, and that as he approached old age his task was systematically diminished. As to excessive toil at any time of life, he would perhaps conclude that it was no easy thing to drive a gang of Africans really hard. He would be assured, quite incorrectly, that the slave's food and comfort generally were greater than those of factory workers in the North, and, perhaps only too__truly, that his privations were less than those of the English agricultural labourer at that time. A wide and careful survey of the subject was made by Frederick Law Olmsted, a New York farmer, who wrote what but for their gloomy subject would be among the best books of travel. He presents to us the picture of a prevailingly sullen, sapless, brutish life, but certainly not of acute misery or habitual oppression. A Southerner old enough to remember slavery would probably not question the accuracy of his details, but would insist, very likely with truth, that there was more human happiness there than an investigator on such a quest would readily discover. Even on large plantations in the extreme South, where the owner only lived part of the year, and most things had to be left to an almost always unsatisfactory overseer, the verdict of the observer was apt to be "not so bad as I expected."

On the other hand, many of us know Longfellow's grim poem of the Hunted Negro. It is a true picture of the life led in the Dismal Swamps of Virginia by numbers of skulking fugitives, till the industry of negro-hunting, conducted with hounds of considerable value, ultimately made their lairs untenable. The scenes in the auction room where, perhaps on the death or failure of their owner, husbands and wives, parents and children, were constantly being severed, and negresses were habitually puffed as brood mares; the gentleman who had lately sold his half-brother, to be sent far south, because he was impudent; the devilish cruelty with which almost

the only recorded slave insurrection was stamped out; the chase and capture and return in fetters of slaves who had escaped north, or, it might be, of free negroes in their place; the advertisements for such runaways, which Dickens collected, and which described each by his scars or mutilations; the systematic slave breeding, for the supply of the cotton States, which had become a staple industry of the once glorious Virginia; the demand arising for the restoration of the African slave trade-all 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.

There is thus no escape from Lincoln's judgment: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.' It does not follow that the way to right the wrong was simple, or that instant and unmitigated emancipation was the best way. But it does follow that, failing this, it was for the statesmen of the South to devise a policy by which the most flagrant evils should be stopped, and, however cautiously and experimentally, the raising of the status of the slave should be proceeded with. It does not follow that the people who, on one pretext or another, shut their eyes to the evil of the system, while they tried to keep their personal dealing humane, can be sweepingly condemned by any man. But it does follow that a deliberate and sustained policy which, neglecting all reform, strove at all costs to perpetuate