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degree, in Hayti. The towns around the coast, where a few white merchants and the educated mulattoes reside, may be considered as tufts of civilization, and the savage traits inseparable from dense slavery have been a good deal softened down among the country people. But we might as reasonably expect to find an advanced state of civilization in the neighborhood of the Portuguese trading settlements, on the west coast of Africa, as in the interior of Hayti. For want of a proper knowledge of these facts, the non-civilization of Hayti has always been a thorn in the side of abolitionists, and from the same cause, the North generally, during the first half of the late war, was constantly looking for a second edition of the "Horrors of St. Domingo" in the South. But the freedmen of the South have no more in common with the insurrectionary slaves of 1791, in St. Domingo, than any other humanized people have with savages. It is fair to admit that this superior moral and physical condition of our southern Blacks over those of St. Domingo is due, in some degree, to difference of race in the masters. The descendants of French Protestants, English Wesleyans and Baptists, and Austrian Salzburgers, and even those resulting from a cross between Cavaliers and convict-servants, were doubtless less inhuman slave-masters than the progeny of buccaneers and flibustiers. Still the main difference arose from different degrees of density in slavery, Our southern slaves had the best opportunities to learn by looking on. And the most valuable trait in the negro, and that which will most avail to his salvation as a race, is that, whenever he is within reach of civilization, he silently puts forth a tendril and clasps it.
On the Whites, the most curious effect of dense slavery is that of destroying, or greatly impairing the power of moral vision in all matters relating to Blacks. In this respect, the trial for murder of the Hon. Arthur Hodge, planter and member of His Majesty's Council in the island of Tortola, and there hanged, in 1811, is a psychological study. Along through the years including 1805 and 1803, this gentleman, by cart-whipping at "short quarters," by pouring boiling water down the throat, by burning with hot irons, and by clipping in coppers of scalding water, murdered eight of his slaves and one freeman. Tortola is twelve
