Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/345

 your superiors, — regularly stripped and plundered, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, through a whole lifetime; and that, too, by pure fraud and force, without any consenting folly on their part; plundered, too, not only of the earnings of their hands, but, it may be, of the very wives of their affections, and children of their love, sent off to a slave auction, to suit the convenience, or to meet the necessities, of the men that call themselves their owners; and with just about as much right and title of ownership as this gambler has in you — the right of the weak over the strong, and of the crafty over the simple!"





the late clerk, bookkeeper, and partner of Gouge and McGrab, now, as it seemed, professional blackleg and gambler, might be able, from his former connection with that respectable slave trading firm, to afford me information essential to the search in which I was engaged, I received his advances very graciously. In fact the manliness of sentiment which he had evinced the day before in the defence of his favorite candidate for the vice-presidency had inclined me in his favor; and as to his present pursuits, I was disposed to think them quite as honest and respectable as the slave trading business in which he had formerly been engaged, or as the slave breeding business by which so many southern gentlemen of unquestioned respectability gained at least a part of their livelihood.

I found him, indeed, a very agreeable companion, free, in a great measure, from those local provincialisms and narrownesses almost universal among even the best educated and most liberal-minded Americans — keen in his observations, acute in his judgments, (a vein of sly satire running through