this feeling that all dishonest men appeal for support, and when the mass suppose they have more to gain than to lose by their dishonesty the appeal is too often successful. It has been so with the masters of slaves. They have interwoven their interests with those of others. They have found it necessary to admit others to a share of the plunder, for the purpose of securing the rest.

The labor of two and a half millions of people upon a bountiful soil, though ill directed, must yield, beyond their bare support in working condition, an immense amount of wealth. If it were suffered to accumulate, it would soon cover the land with palaces. But instead of any thing like this, our southern country gives every indication that the wealth of the soil is prodigally dissipated as fast as it is produced. And it is in fact the common plunder of the country. The whole white race at the South participate in it. Northern merchants, northern mechanics, and manufacturers, northern editors, publishers, and printers, northern hotels, stages, steamboats, rail-roads, canal boats, northern banks, northern schoolmasters, northern artists, northern colleges, and northern ministers of the Gospel, all get their share of emolument from this general robbery of the poor. It is true enough that a much larger amount of wealth might be derived from the fertile plains of the South by a system of free labor, but it could not be obtained without more exertion on the part of all who are to enjoy it. When men have earned their money by their own labor they are sparing in the use of it, and do not like to part with it but for a full equivalent. But when they have obtained it at the expense of others they spend it liberally. Hence, there is a "generosity" in the patronage of slaveholders which we do not find in the patronage of even richer men whose wealth is the fruit of their own industry. It is this free hand which endears them to most who go among them or have any dealings with them. Multitudes who imagine themselves opposed to slavery lose their hearts through their pockets, at the first contact with Southern men. They would indignantly repel the insinuation that they had been corrupted through their interests or had ceased to be opposed to slavery. And perhaps it is not exactly true that they have been bought to support slavery, or that they are less opposed to it than they ever were. But they have seen slaveholders and know that they are honorable customers and generous friends-they believe they have their peculiar rea

sons for what they do--and they know that it is hopeless to interfere. They imagine themselves as much the friends of the slave as ever, and they certainly see much more to admire in the master. They are persuaded that it is worse than useless to do any thing for the abolition of slavery which does not set out with the consent of the master. They are sure that all they ever get or expect to get of the gains of slavery would not tempt them to continue the system if it were in their power to abolish it. And thus they convince themselves that their part in the great robbery has not made them either the enemies of the slave or of the abolitionist. But it has certainly made them the friends of the slaveholder. They admire the slaveholder and shield him from the denunciations of the abolitionists, because there is nothing sordid in him, but every thing noble, generous and friendlyall of which means that he has given freely to themselves or their friends in one way or another. Now let us count the men who have direct intercourse with the South, and then take into the account the circles of their northern friends each intersecting or touching other circles, and we shall find at last that there is not an individual in the whole country whose opinion is not in a greater or less degree acted upon by an influence which was set in motion by a southern bribe. Whole masses of men are thus pulling in the harness of the slaveholders with laborious zeal, while they would have us believe that they are enemies of slavery. They may be unconscious of their friendship for it, but it is none the less real for that.

We might crowd pages with facts illustrating the importance which slaveholders attach to northern support, and the confidence they have in the tie of pecuniary interest, as well as the base servility practised by northern men without a blush, as if it were but the manifestation of honorable friendship or Christian charity. But it would be wasted room. These facts are too common to excite surprise. The idol of slavery has been set up and the burning wrath of the South has been proclaimed as the penalty for refusing to fall down and worship. Not only have the venders of dry goods and groceries, been obliged to disclaim abolition, but the Pharaoh of the South has laid his injunctions upon that profession whose honorable business it is to bring into the world the creations of thought, and has commanded them as did the Egyptian King their prototypes of old, to strangle at the birth

ter.

every thing that bears the manly tokens of a love for human liberty. And alas, that we must say it, our literary accoucheurs, unlike those noble Hebrew women, have not feared God and disobeyed the king! We must be allowed to give one or two specimens of the servility to which we refer, which will show as well as a thousand, how by sheer bribery, slavery is corrupting all that is noble in moral feeling, and prostrating all that is honorable in national characThe cases we select from the multitude are not peculiar. Nor have we any private resentment to gratify in bringing them forward. Some objections were made in the Columbia (S. C.) Telescope, to the Narrative of Messrs. Reed and Matheson, as containing incendiary matter. soon as the eyes of the publishers, Harper and Brothers of this city, fell on these remarks, they immediately wrote to the editor of the Telescope, excusing themselves on the ground that they were not able to read every book they published, and did not suspect any thing improper. Most humbly do they endeavor to persuade the slaveholders that they would not willingly publish any thing offensive to them, and close with the following words:

"You have no doubt heard of Mr. Abdy's book, which was represented to us as very ably written, and likely to be profitable; but we were told, also, that Mr. Abdy was an abolitionist, and we would have nothing to do with him. We are, very respectfully,

Your obedient servants,

HARPER & BROTHERS."

But obediently servile as they were, they were careless enough after this to publish the "Tales of the Woods and Fields" a romance, containing a whole chapter of "true abolition stuff." The southern "patriarchs" behaved as they are wont to do when an awkward slave upsets a dish of gravy. The Harpers, one of the largest, if not the very largest, publishing house in America, got down upon their knees still more humbly than before, and wrote the following penitential letter to a Charleston bookseller, which was published in the Charleston Mercury.

"Dear Sir,--We were entirely ignorant of the fact that the 'Woods and Fields' contained the objectionable matter referred to in your letter of the 2d inst. until after the work was published. The peculiar circumstances in which we were placed, rendered it necessary to issue the work in an unusually short ume, and without a previous perusal. We regret the inadvertency very much. We trust, however, that our friends at the South are sufficiently well acquainted with our views and feelings, on the delicate subject in question, to attribute the circumstance to the right cause. By this time it must be pretty generally understood in

your section, as well as elsewhere, that we uniformly decline publishing works calculated to interfere in any way with southern rights and southern institutions. Our interests, not less than our opinions, would dictate this course, if there were no other less selfish considerations acting upon us. Since the receipt of your letter, we have printed an edition of the Woods and Fields,' in which the offensive matter has been omitted.

In haste,

Yours respectfully,

HARPER & BROTHERS."

"In haste !" Yes, what trembling slave ever made greater haste to obey the tyrant in whom was vested the ownership of both his soul and body? In one short month the fiat of expurgation travels from Charleston to New-York, the Harpers settle it with their consciences to expunge, mutilate, and falsify the work of a foreign author, and are prepared to say, that they have printed a new edition "in which the offensive matter has been omitted." Here, for the sake of southern custom, is perpetrated a literary forgery, or we should rather say murder, which in a free country, where mind had its honors, should have brought on these publishers everlasting disgrace-yet they are "honorable men"-for they have stooped no lower than the mercantile community in which they move!

A similar outrage has been perpetrated upon the valuable historical and topographical work on the United States of the Rev. John Howard Hinton of England, republished in numbers under the editorial care of Samuel Knapp, Esq. The slaveholders were displeased with the faithful accuracy of their own portraits in one of the numbers and resorted to their usual redress in such cases. In New Orleans a large quantity of the numbers were seized and burnt, and the agent fled for his life. In Charleston another agent collected the copies of the obnoxious number and withdrew them. The publishers at the North took the hint, and prepared another edition, in which the offensive passage was omitted, and thus the Rev. Mr. Hinton was made, perforce, to observe a proper silence on the delicate subject.

It is perfectly immaterial whether we attribute to interest, or to friendship for the slaveholder, such instances of shameful sycophancy, which have become too common to bring reproach. Their bearing on the slave is the same in either

case.

But great as is the influence of southern bribery, in the shape of custom, patronage, friendship and hospitality, there

is opposition that has been encountered, and is yet to be, which cannot be thus accounted for. There is an enmity to our principles which does not depend upon the price of cotton. Autocrats are not the only men who love power. The foundation for slavery is broadly laid in perverted human nature, and Mr. McDuffie is not the only man who holds that slavery in some form is one of the essential elements of society. There are men among us who have no fondness for the form of slavery that exists at the South, who are nevertheless deadly hostile to our doctrines in regard to human rights. They are the men who pay homage to wealth and power and place, whose respect and reverence for a man depends more upon the coat which he wears, than the heart which he carries within him. They do not freely accord to their fellow-men the right of thinking as they please on any subject. They are deeply jealous of free thought, and depend less upon reason and truth to combat what they consider error of opinion, than upon management and gagging. This class of men have, with much propriety, been denominated the aristocracy of the North. Aside from all motives of pecuniary interest, and all theories in regard to the justice or policy of the peculiar type of oppression existing at the South, they hold a set of opinions in perfect accordance with those of slaveholders. Their ethics are essentially slaveholding ethics. Their system of morals sacrifices not only private will, but private right, to what they please to call the public good. Abuses sanctioned by law become with them forever sacred. According to their republicanism the rights of the minority, (when they happen not to be in it) are held by the free grace of the majority. In ecclesiastical matters they are always "high church"-conservatists of forms, powers, creeds, usages, rather than of the blessedly free and benevolent spirit of the Founder of christianity. They seem to fear the prevalence of abolition principles not so much from their hostile bearing upon southern slavery, as lest they should undermine their own power and influence. It is from these men, entrenched in offices of church and state, or wielding the power of old established presses that we have the bitterest opposition to expect.

The opposition during the past year from both the sources to which we have referred has been more active and virulent than ever.

The newspaper presses have poured out