Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/464

Rh years, and still is improving. Light is beginning to enter this country; people are no longer afraid of speaking. A few years ago, if a person had published a seventh part of what I have now told you, he would have been shot without any further process. The slave-owner now acknowledges that the eye of the public is directed to him. It makes him more careful. Slaves, for the last ten or twelve years, have been better clothed and fed in this part of the country than they used to be; but sadly too much injustice, and sadly too much cruelty exists still, and must always exist so long as this institution lasts. And it is my conviction that it will soon become ‘the question’— the question of life and death within the American Union.

“Even now a man makes no demur about shooting down a negro whom he suspects of intending to run away, and the law is silent on all such acts of violence. I have seen many slaves severely wounded from having been shot at under such circumstances; but one only killed. “Passion, and that of the most frantic description, is common in the treatment of slaves.

“The law is no protection to the slave. It is nominally so, but it is not any actual defence. The slave suffers from his master; the lawyers shut their eyes to the affair as long as they can; and the negro cannot be a witness in a court of justice.

“They talk of public opinion; but public opinion is here as yet, for the most part, the product of demagogues. And the cotton interest is its only conscience. Many people see all this as very wrong, and deplore it, but they are silent, from the fear of involving themselves in trouble.

“The festivals of the slaves are for the most part a fiction. On some plantations the slaves are allowed to dance at Christmas, if the cotton is picked and the sugar