and however cordially they may dislike or despise the mercantile tendencies of Atlantic Americans, or transatlantic Englishmen, their frequent contact with them breaks down some of the barriers of difference between them, and humanises the slaveholder of the great cities into some relation with the spirit of his own times and country.  But these men are but a most inconsiderable portion of the slaveholding population of the South,—­a nation, for as such they should be spoken of, of men whose organisation and temperament is that of the southern European; living under the influence of a climate at once enervating and exciting; scattered over trackless wildernesses of arid sand and pestilential swamp; entrenched within their own boundaries; surrounded by creatures absolutely subject to their despotic will; delivered over by hard necessity to the lowest excitements of drinking, gambling, and debauchery for sole recreation; independent of all opinion; ignorant of all progress; isolated from all society—­it is impossible to conceive a more savage existence within the pale of any modern civilisation.

The South Carolinan gentry have been fond of styling themselves the chivalry of the South, and perhaps might not badly represent, in their relations with their dependents, the nobility of France before the purifying hurricane of the Revolution swept the rights of the suzerain and the wrongs of the serf together into one bloody abyss.  The planters of the interior of the Southern and South-Western States, with their furious feuds and slaughterous combats, their stabbings and pistolings, their gross sensuality, brutal ignorance, and despotic cruelty, resemble the chivalry of France before the horrors of the Jacquerie admonished them that there was a limit even to the endurance of slaves.  With such men as these, human life, even when it can be bought or sold in the market for so many dollars, is but little protected by considerations of interest from the effects of any violent passion.  There is yet, however, another aspect of the question, which is, that it is sometimes clearly not the interest of the owner to prolong the life of his slaves; as in the case of inferior or superannuated labourers, or the very notorious instance in which some of the owners of sugar plantations stated that they found it better worth their while to work off (i.e. kill with labour) a certain proportion, of their force, and replace them by new hands every seven years, than work them less severely and maintain them in diminished efficiency for an indefinite length of time.  Here you will observe a precise estimate of the planter’s material interest led to a result which you argue passion itself can never be so blind as to adopt.  This was a deliberate economical calculation, openly avowed some years ago by a number of sugar planters in Louisiana.  If, instead of accusing Mrs. Stowe of exaggeration, you had brought the same charge against the author of the ‘White Slave,’ I should not have