AMERICAN SLAVERY AS IT NOW STANDS REVEALED TO THE WORLD.

(From Good Words, edited by Norman McLeod, D.D., and published in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Scotland.]

Whatever may be yet the issue of the American conflict, it will have done two great things,-it will have cast a flood of light upon the condition of the American slaves,-it will have given freedom to great masses of them, if not to all.

Until the secession war broke out, the means of accurately ascertaining the positive conditions of the slave in the United States were scanty, and to a great extent doubtful. On the one hand, we had the representations of masters and of their friends. These were always likely to be warped by self-interest; even when most sincerely meant, to exhibit but a portion of the truth. In all countries the best employers are the most accessible, the most willing to come forward in testimony of the condition of the employed; yet none are generally more ignorant of the worst practices used in their trade. How much more must this be the case in the slave system, where every possible malpractice in the employment of labor must be intensified a hundred fold, by the practically absolute powers of the master, and by the darkness with which he has the right to surround his proceedings. Here evidently those who come into the light of publicity will be those only who

have no cause, or think they have no cause, to fear it; and who, living in comparative light themselves, have no idea of what may be passing in the dens of darkness around them. The tendency of slave-owning is, moreover, emphatically one of insulation. The best of slave-owners as well as the worst would fain have never a neighbor, since all intercourse with other plantations tends to undermine either the slaveowner's moral or his physical authority.

Now slavery has come to be seen at once in all its breadth and in all its detail. Where formerly it could only be outlined or lightly sketched from a few points of view, it may now be photographed in its minutest features, and from every point. The mass of testimony is overwhelming, and may be checked and counterchecked from white to black and from black to white to any extent. But an ugly picture it offers, look at it how and whence you will. For the result of all this mass of new evidence is simply this, that the worst that has been hitherto said by isolated voices against American slavery, has been abundantly confirmed; that the distant picture of it has turned out faint and pale beside the reality; that contact with the "patriarchal institution," so far from converting one sincere abolitionist from the errors of his ways, or confounding one dishonest one, has turned into ardent abolitionists, hundreds and thousands of men who, when they first went down South, were avowedly strong pro-slavery men.

The legal elements of the slave's condition have

long since been known. They are all mainly summed up in this: He is not a person, but a thing; at least as towards his master, he or she has no signal honor, no family ties. There is no punishment under any of the southern slave-codes for the worst outrage by a master on a slave woman's virtue, on a slave man's marriage-tie; no legal limit to the uses to which he may put either. The slave has no rights of property; is legally forbidden to develop his intellect by education.

Instead of saying, Because slaves are property they will be well treated, the true reasoning is, Because slaves are property, therefore they will be ill-treated, therefore they will surely call forth against them in many an instance every latent capacity of absolute devilhood which lies in the master's bosom.

Are you sorry that this should be so? God forbid. As is the tree, so is its fruit. Thank God that men do not gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles! else would they allow the whole world to be overspread of them. Let the thorn tear, let the thistle prick, that man may know that they are there simply to be fought with and rooted out.

Now the worst side of slavery is no doubt the moral side of it. Though it had no evil physical side to it, it would yet be abominable. Though every slave had plenty to eat, plenty to drink, good shelter, good clothing, moderate work, skillful care in sickness, it is yet hideous that a man should not be a man, a husband not a husband, a father not a

father. But the war has shown that the physical maltreatment of slaves was anything but a rare exception.

An officer, writing from Louisiana to the Boston Transcript, stated that not one recruit "in fifteen is free from marks of severe lashing," and that "more than one-half are rejected" (the rejections

being themselves more than half of the number that offer) "because of disability, arising from lashing of whips, and biting of dogs on their calves and thighs;" whilst Mr. Wesley Richards, a surgeon, writing May 25, 1863, to the Cincinnati Free Nation, after examining about 700 recruits, says that "at least one-half bore evidence of having been severely whipped and maltreated in various ways;" some "stabbed with a knife, others shot through the limbs, some wounded with clubs until their bones were broken," and others had their hamstrings cut to prevent their running off. And General Saxton, in command of the Department of the South (comprising South Carolina, Georgia, Florida), on being examined before the "Freedmen's Inquiry Commission," stated that there was scarcely one of the negroes whose back was not "covered with scars." East and West, it will be seen, the testimony is the same.

The Rev. William Taylor, in a pamphlet on the "Cause and probable results of the Civil War in America," relates the following, which has the advantage of showing the patriarchal institution under its "pious" aspect:

"A dear friend of mine, in my native county, in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, was passing the house of a neighbor, and saw in the barn-yard, suspended from a beam * * * a colored woman hung up by her hands. She was nearly naked, had been whipped until she was unable to moan aloud, and had an ear of Indian corn stuck in her mouth as a gag. In that condition she was left hanging till her master should take his breakfast, and have family prayers. My friend went in to see him, and remonstrated in vain to have her taken down, till after the family devotions were over. This pious (?) family I knew well, and their three children, William, Arthur, and Adeline, were taught authority between the ages of five and ten years by being set to whip the said poor woman at will, and she was beaten and scarred up so as to present a most unnatural and hideous appearance."

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But these are only the milder mercies of the eastern seaboard. We must go to the dreaded Southwest to find the lashings carried to the pitch of disabling the sufferer-the stabbings, shootings, poundings of limbs with clubs, cuttings of hamstrings, of which the surgeons speak. Yet the surgeons had nothing to say but to men, and those living ones. In God's avenging hosts, which we see not, there may be other and more helpless recruits. The Rev. Mr. Aughey, who was a minister in Mississippi at the outbreak of secession, in a work called the "Iron Furnace," tells of some of these. "Mr. Pipkin, who resided near