Page:A Chapter on Slavery.djvu/151

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SLAVERY IN AMERICA.
137

has presented to us a view of the truly cheerful and peaceful cabin of "Uncle Tom," in Kentucky, together with the merriment of Andy and "black Sam," and the easy and contented condition of all the people of Mr. Selby's plantation — a true specimen, doubtless, of hundreds of others. She has brought before us, too, the representative of another large class — the frank and noble-hearted St. Clare, the considerate and affectionate master, conscious of all the wrongs and evils of the system, yet seeing no distinct way of removing it. Here, too, "Uncle Tom" has a pleasant home, with the little angel Eva to light his path and point him to the skies But then, in the next place, she sets forth — in a manner that goes to the heart — the terrible evil of the system itself, which, like a devouring monster, can break into these paradises, and seizing its victim, carry him away to be tortured to death in the den of a Legree. The authoress has treated the subject in a truly philosophical manner. It is the enormous and irremediable evils of the system as a system — of the institution as an institution — which she seeks to expose; not merely presenting scenes of suffering and cruelty, which thousands of slave-holders may justly deny having anything to do with, and which they would feel as great an abhorrence of as any, — but by the course of her story she seeks to make manifest, what none can deny, namely, that the system itself, in permitting human beings to be sold to the highest bidder, renders all at any time liable to the extremest cruelties, either through the insolvency or death of even the kindest master. It