to throw away his brains upon the work that has no need of brains, and which Quashy could do just as well as he, and, it may be, a little better?

But perhaps it may be said, If Quashy has no brains, then go to work and give him brains. Well, this is just what we are doing, and have been doing for the last two hundred years, and with encouraging indications, too, of eventual success. Quashy is already, as I said above, (Note 2,) undeniably several generations in advance of his black brother in Africa, but he is, no less undeniably, several generations behind his white brother in Europe and America; and, therefore, he must not think to put himself on a level with him, but must e'en content himself with being in process of melioration, however slow the process be. Even should it take four hundred years in all, as did the disciplining of the Israelites in Egypt, it will be time well spent.

Meanwhile, so long as so many of Quashy's white brethren in America, and so many more in Europe, have to do work, to the full, as hard, and as dirty, and as disagreeable, as Quashy himself, I do not see that Quashy's case calls for any peculiar sympathy, so far as the hardness, and the dirtiness, and the disagreeableness of his work is concerned; and therefore, all about the said hardness, and dirtiness, and disagreeableness, in the paragraph aforesaid, may go for so much rhetoric, thrown in for effect upon the undiscriminating, who, unhappily, in those cases where the sympathies are enlisted, form the majority even of educated people.

So much for the hardness, and the dirtiness, and the disagreeableness, of Quashy's work; at least, for the present; I shall have more to say on it, by and by, when we come to the subject of the European labouring classes.

But there is another assertion in the paragraph quoted at the commencement of this note, that requires notice:

"Because my brother Quashy is ignorant and weak, and I am intelligent and strong,—because I know how and can do it,—therefore, I may steal all he has, keep it, and give him only such and so much as suits my fancy."

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This, if true, is a very serious matter; neither more nor less than a deliberate and wanton violation of the eighth commandment. But is it true? Is it á fact that Quashy does not receive a fair return for his labour? Let us make a calculation. For the first fourteen years of his life, Quashy is a bill of expense to his master, costing him, on the average, here in Maryland, twenty-five dollars a year, which, for fourteen years, amounts to three hundred and fifty dollars. To this must be added the average interest, which would be six cent. for seven years, if the earlier years of the fourteen were as expensive as the latter; but as they are not, we will put it at six per cent for five years, or one hundred and five dollars in all; which added to the three hundred and fifty makes four hundred and fifty-five dollars for the cost of Quashy to his master, at fourteen years of age. From fourteen to twenty-one, he barely pays his keeping, so that to his cost at fourteen must be added seven years' compound interest at six per cent, making his cost to his master, at twenty-one, omitting fractions, six hundred and eighty-four dollars. This is supposing him to live till twenty-one; but as, according to the census returns for 1850, thirty in every one hundred die before that age, and the average time of their death is at seven years old, the expense of raising thirty for seven years, or, which is the same, say twelve for fourteen years, (it would be, fifteen for fourteen years, if the expense of the last seven years were no greater than the first seven,) must be added to the cost of seventy in every one-hundred; that is to say, to the above six-hundred and eighty-four dollars must be added twelveseventieths of itself, to get at the actual cost of Quashy to

his master, at twenty-one; which gives, in round numbers, eight-hundred dollars.

Now, if Quashy is not to be a bill of expense to his master, he must pay six per cent. interest on his cost, and an additional one and three-quarters per cent. life-insurance; in all, seven and three-quarters per cent., or sixty-two dollars per annum, which is a little over five dollars a month. This, then, is Quashy's wages, already paid him, in advance, in the shape of food and clothing, &c., during his minority.*

If now we add to this, (what every New-Englander who has lived at the South knows,) that Quashy does not do more than one-third, or, at the very utmost, one-half as much work as an able-bodied labourer on a farm at the North, (see Note 15,) and that for this he receives, besides the five dollars above mentioned, his food, clothing and shelter, with medical attendance and nursing when sick, and no deduction for lost time, even though he should be sick for years, while the "farm-hand" at the North gets only ten or twelve dollars, and has to clothe himself out of it, and pay his own doctor's and nurse's bill in sickness, to say nothing of lost time, I think we shall come to the conclusion that if there has been stealing anywhere, it has not been from Quashy.

But it will be said, Quashy's master gets rich on Quashy's labour. Well! what is the inference from this ?—that Quashy's master is a thief? If so, then Jonathan is a bigger thief, for he gets rich faster on the labour of his "hired man." For my part, I do not think that either of them is a thief, though Jonathan certainly comes the nearer to it of the two.

* Should it be said that the free labourer at the North does not pay his father for the expense he has been at in rearing him in childhood, and therefore Quashy ought not to be required to pay interest on that item, I answer, He does pay him, though in a different way; he pays him in rearing his own children,-an expense that Quashy is free from.

There is one other thing in the quotation requiring notice"Quashy shall do my will, and not his, all the days of his mortal life, and have such chance of getting to heaven, at last, as I find convenient." Now, if it were true that slavery diminished Quashy's chance of getting to heaven, that, of itself, would be sufficient to condemn it. But the truth is, Quashy's chance is better in slavery, than it would be out of it; just as a poor orphan boy's chance of getting to heaven would be better as an apprentice, even under an exacting master, than as a truant and a vagabond; for a truant and a vagabond, out of slavery, Quashy would be. He cannot take care of himself; he has never been used to it. In his native land, he was uncared for, and ran wild; here, he has been taken good care of, and has improved; but he must improve a good deal more, before he will be capable of self-government, either socially or individually.

To use an expressive epithet of Miss Ophelia's, Quashy is a shiftless creature ;-shiftless, in the figurative sense of the term, and would be so, very soon, in the literal, if left to himself. He is so, in his native land; he is very nearly so, in Jamaica, and the other British dependencies in that quarter, as I shall show in a subsequent note. (See Note 9.)

But that Quashy's chance for heaven, in slavery, is not quite so hopeless, after all, is shown by the fact that about one-tenth of the Methodist communicants in the United States, are slaves, which is almost the proportion of the slaves to the whites throughout the whole country. (See Appendix, D.) But even if the proportion of the negro communicants to the whites were not one-half, or even one-fourth, as large as it is, it would still have to be shown, (which it never could be,) that it would be larger, were they set free, before Quashy's chance for getting to heaven could be said to be diminished by slavery.

NOTE 5.-THE SLAVE-CODE-ABUSES OF SLAVERY.

"Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse! And the only reason why the land don't sink under it, like Sodom and Gomorrah, is because it is used in a way infinitely better than it is. For pity's sake, for shame's sake, because we are men born of women, and not savage beasts, many of us do not and dare not, we would scorn to use the full power which our savage laws put into our hands. And he who goes the furthest, and does the worst, only uses within limits, the power that the law gives him." (Vol. ii. p. 11.)

In our author's eye, the slave-code is evidently a raw-head and bloody-bones-a monster of injustice,—and she can hardly say enough against it. I will here set down what she does say, and then, after some general observations on the subject, take up each point in detail. The quotations that follow, are in the order of the narrative.

(1.) "Whoever visits some estates there," (in Kentucky,) "and witnesses the good-humoured indulgence of some masters and mistresses, and the affectionate loyalty of some slaves, might be tempted to dream the oft-fabled poetic legend of a patriarchal institution, and all that; but over and above the scene there broods a portentous shadow-the shadow of law. So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to a master,-so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil,-so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best regulated administration of slavery." (Vol. i. p. 23.)