[257]“With one hand put
A penny in the urn of poverty,
And with the other took a shilling out.1”
And a celebrated traveller through Russia, more than a generation ago, describes a kindred spirit, who, while on his knees before an altar of the Greek Church, devoutly told his beads with one hand, and with the other deliberately picked the pocket of a fellow-sinner by his side.
The speaker then, by a careful comparison between the industrial, social, and literary condition of the slave and the free States, presented the sad results of slavery.
In speaking of the influence of the slave-system on the characters of the slave-masters he said,--
Barbarous standards of conduct are unblushingly avowed. The swagger of a bully is called chivalry; a swiftness to quarrel is called courage; the bludgeon is adopted as the substitute for argument; and assassination is lifted to be one of the fine arts. Long ago it was fixed certain that the day which made man a slave “took half his worth away,” --words from the ancient harp of Homer, resounding through long generations. Nothing here is said of the human being at the other end of the chain. To aver that on this same day all his worth is taken away, might seem inconsistent with exceptions which we gladly recognize; but, alas! it is too clear, both from reason and from evidence, that, bad as slavery is for the slave, it is worse for the master.
