1875. 1880. CHAUCER. N old man in a lodge within a park; ΑΝ The chamber walls depicted all around With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound, Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark The Canterbury Tales, and his old age uu 1880. The little waves, with their soft, white hands, And the tide rises, the tide falls. The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls And the tide rises, the tide falls. George Fitzhugh. BORN in Prince William Co., Va., 1807. DIED at Huntsville, Texas, 1881. A FRANK PRO-SLAVERY ARGUMENT. [Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters. 1857.] THE negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. The women do little hard work, and are protected from the despotism of their husbands by their masters. The negro men and stout boys work, on the average, in good weather, not more than nine hours a day. The balance of their time is spent in perfect abandon. Besides, they have their Sabbaths and holidays. White men, with so much of license and liberty, would die of ennui; but negroes luxuriate in corporeal and mental repose. With their faces upturned to the sun, they can sleep at any hour; and quiet sleep is the greatest of human enjoyments. "Blessed be the man who invented sleep." Tis happiness in itself—and results from contentment with the present, and confident assurance of the future. We do not know whether free laborers ever sleep. They are fools to do so; for, whilst they sleep, the wily and watchful capitalist is devising means to ensnare and exploitate them. The free laborer must work or starve. He is more of a slave than the negro, because he works longer and harder for less allowance than the slave, and has no holiday, because the cares of life with him begin when its labors end. He has no liberty, and not a single right. We know, 'tis often said, air and water are common property, which all have equal right to participate and enjoy; but this is utterly false. The appropriation of the lands carries with it the appropriation of all on or above the lands, usque ad cœlum, aut ad inferos. A man cannot breathe the air without a place to breathe it from, and all places are appropriated. All water is private property "to the middle of the stream," except the ocean, and that is not fit to drink. Free laborers have not a thousandth part of the rights and liberties of negro slaves. Indeed, they have not a single right or a single liberty, unless it be the right or liberty to die. But the reader may think that he and other capitalists and employers are freer than negro slaves. Your capital would soon vanish if you dared indulge in the liberty and abandon of negroes. You hold your wealth and position by the tenure of constant watchfulness, care, and circumspection. You never labor; but you are never free. Where a few own the soil, they have unlimited power over the balance of society, until domestic slavery comes in, to compel them to permit this balance of society to draw a sufficient and comfortable living from "terra mater." Free society asserts the rights of a few to the earth-slavery maintains that it belongs, in different degrees, to all. But, reader, well may you follow the slave-trade. It is the only trade worth following, and slaves the only property worth owning. All other is worthless, a mere caput mortuum, except in so far as it vests the owner with the power to command the labors of others--to enslave them. Give you a palace, ten thousand acres of land, sumptuous clothes, equipage and every other luxury; and with your artificial wants, you are poorer than Robinson Crusoe, or the lowest working man, if you have no slaves to capital, or domestic slaves. Your capital will not bring you an income of a cent, nor supply one of your wants, without laborLabor is indispensable to give value to property, and if you owned everything else, and did not own labor, you would be poor. But fifty thousand dollars means, and is, fifty thousand dollars' worth of slaves. You can command, without touching on that capital, three thousand dollars' worth of labor per annum. You could do no more were you to buy slaves with it, and then you would be cumbered with the cares of governing and providing for them. You are a slaveholder now, to the amount of fifty thousand dollars, with all the advantages, and none of the cares and responsibilities of a master. "Property in man" is what all are struggling to obtain. Why should they not be obliged to take care of man, their property, as they do of their horses and their hounds, their cattle and their sheep? Now, under the delusive name of liberty, you work him "from morn to dewy eve"-from infancy to old age-then turn him out to starve. You treat your horses and hounds better. Capital is a cruel master; the free slave trade, the commonest, yet the cruellest of trades. Richard Hildreth. BORN in Deerfield, Mass., 1807. DIED in Florence, Italy, 1865. JEFFERSON. [The History of the United States of America. 1849-52.-Revised Edition. 1880.] NOT OTHING, indeed, could have been less in accordance with Jefferson's political theories than to have thrust upon the country one of the most momentous measures which it was possible to adopt, involv ing the very livelihood of tens of thousands, without warning, without discussion, without the least opportunity to have the public opinion upon it; employing for that purpose a servile Congress, driven to act hastily in the dark, with no other guide or motive beyond implicit trust in the wisdom of the executive-and such a measure the embargo, the most remarkable act of Jefferson's administration, unquestionably was. Yet it would be most rash and unjust to charge him or any man with political hypocrisy merely because, when in power, he did not act up to the doctrines which he had preached in opposition. It is not in the nature of enthusiasm to hesitate or to doubt; and that very enthusiasm, though it had liberty and equality for its object, with which Jefferson was so strongly imbued, pushed him on, however he might theorize about the equal right of all to be consulted, to the realization of his own ideas, with very little regard to opposing opinions. With all his attachment to theoretical equality, he was still one of those born to command, at least to control; brooking no authority but his own; and not easily admitting of opposition or contradiction, which he always ascribed to the worst of motives; while in the feeling that he sought not selfish. ends, but the good of the community, he found, like so many other zealous men, sanction for his plans, justification of his means, and excuse for disregarding the complaints and even the rights of individuals. Yet, whatever defects of personal character, whatever amount of human weaknesses we may ascribe to Jefferson; however low we may rate him as a practical statesman; however deficient we may think him even in manliness and truth; however we may charge him with having failed to act in accordance with his own professed principles; there remains behind, after all, this undeniable fact: he was-rarity, indeed, among men of affairs-rarity, indeed, among professed democratical leaders a sincere and enthusiastic believer in the rights of humanity. And, as in so many other like cases, this faith on his part will ever suffice to cover, as with the mantle of charity, a multitude of sins; nor will there ever be wanting a host of worshippers-living ideas being of vastly more consequence to posterity than dead actions passed and gone to mythicize him into a political saint, canonized by throbbing wishes for themselves, and exalted, by a passionate imagination, far above the heads of cotemporary men, who, if they labored, suffered, and accomplished more for that generation, yet loved and trusted universal humanity less. Between Jefferson as a political theorist, palliating Shay's rebellion by the general remark that a little insurrection now and then is necessary to keep every kind of government in order; between Jefferson as leader of the opposition, denouncing the tax on whiskey as "infernal,” and almost justifying the rebellion against it, and Jefferson as President, dissatisfied with the law of treason as laid down by Chase and Marshall, calling upon Congress for greater stringency, seeking to enforce the embargo by assumptions of power, which, if constitutional, which multitudes questioned, were vastly more arbitrary and meddlesome than anything in the Excise Act, there was, indeed, a striking contrast. “I Theodore Sedgwick Fay. BORN in New York, N. Y., 1807. A GERMAN FIRE-EATER. [Norman Leslie. 1835.-Revised Edition. 1869.] HAVE myself," said Kreutzner, "witnessed many duels. But we Europeans are not so blood-thirsty as you moral Americans. A duel seldom occurs except among military men and students; occasionally among noblemen or high governmental officials. And when it does occur it is less inspired by a desire to kill. Even students take care to avoid fatal results. We students call it Paukerei, and look upon it as a sort of frolic. We don't use the bowie-knife, scarcely the pistol. Our little matters are generally settled with the sword. Any poltroon may pull a trigger, but it requires courage and nerve to manage the steel. When I was at the University of Heidelberg, there used to be a duel nearly every day. The slightest cause, or no cause at all, and-crack! there they stood-plunge and parry, cut and thrust-till a cheek was laid open or a nose chopped off." "The ruffians!" exclaimed Norman. "Pooh!" said Kreutzner, "only fine young boys letting off their steam. The story I promised is a tradition of past times which had not |