Marriages among slaves are encouraged, and husband and wife are not allowed to be sold separately. Children under sixteen years old cannot be separated from their parents.
Masters illegally punishing their slaves, are subject to fine, imprisonment, and loss of the slave, for the first offence; for the second offence, sequestration of all their slaves.
Free colored representatives are allowed to take their seat in the legislature, and share all the other privileges of British subjects.
Yet these humane laws, so carefully framed in favor of the defenceless, have been found insufficient to protect the slave. Experience proves, what reason clearly points out, that the force of good laws must be weakened by the very nature of this unholy relation. Where there is knowledge and freedom on one side, and ignorance and servitude on the other, evasions and subterfuges will of course be frequent. Hence English philanthropists have universally come to the conclusion that nothing effectual can be done, unless slavery itself be destroyed.
The limits of this work compel me to pass by many enactments in our slave-holding States, which would throw still more light on this dark subject.
I have laid open some of the laws which do actually exist, and are constantly enforced in this free country; and knowing all this, and still more, to be true, I blush and hang my head, whenever I hear any one boast of our "glorious institutions."
The slave-holders insist that their humanity is so great, as to render all their ferocious laws perfectly harmless. Are the laws then made on purpose to urge tender-hearted masters to be so much worse than they really desire to be? The democrats of the South appear to be less scrupulous about the liberties of others, than the Autocrat of the Russias;—for, when Madame de Staël told the Emperor Alexander that his character answered instead of a constitution for his country, he replied, "Then, madam, I am but a lucky accident." How much more emphatically may it be said, that the slave's destiny is a matter of chance! Reader, would
