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It is almost superfluous to repeat that the skin-discriminating policy induced as regards the coloured subjects of the Queen since the abolition of slavery did not, and could not, operate when coloured and white stood on the same high level as slave-owners and ruling potentates in the Colonies.
De Bow, the statistician who supervised the census of 1850, estimated that but little over half the holders were actually owners. The proportion of owners diminished between 1850 and 1860, and the News and Courier thinks that there were not more than 150,000 Slave-owners in the Confederate States when the War broke out.
James Anthony Froude, who is just as prophetic as his prototypes, the slave-owners of the last half-century, "it is as certain as anything future can be, that if we give the negroes as a body the political privileges which we claim for ourselves, they will use them only to their own injury."
Business, as we have already seen, had made peace with the South, and conservative leaders of the East regarded slave-owners as in the same class morally with bankers and railway directors. The federal law against the African slave trade could not be enforced.
But these demands were sneered at. The idea of the natural equality in rights of all men, the idea of the personal worth of every man, the idea that rough-clad workers have prerogatives which can be whipped out by no smooth-clad idlers, these ideas were as far beyond serf-owners of those days as they are beyond slave-owners of these days. Nothing was done.
She could not find words to describe the good times that were enjoyed by the wives and daughters of the slave-owners. They had nothing to do except to take the world easy, and that, according to her account, they did with great unanimity.
The number of Northern church-members who have intermarried with slave-holders, and have thus become slave-owners themselves, or enjoy the wealth made by the blood of the slave, especially if there be any Northern ministers of the gospel in such a predicament.
There is a touch of irony, though hardly of mere hypocrisy, in the fact that the Parliament which effected this reform had just been abolishing black slavery by buying out the slave-owners in the British colonies. The slave-owners were bought out at a price big enough to be called blackmail; but it would be misunderstanding the national mentality to deny the sincerity of the sentiment.
There were no needy slave-owners, as there are in commercial colonies; and though slaves might sometimes suffer from a wicked, or even a passionate master, there is no reason to believe that they were habitually over-tasked, or subjected to systematic ill-treatment; for that, indeed, can only arise from avarice, and avarice is not the vice of feudal times.
We let children die by the myriad for lack of proper care and sustenance, and kill them in factories and tenements to gain luxuries for ourselves. One justification for slavery was that it gave leisure for culture to the slave-owners, and that Southern chivalry and the charm of Southern womanhood outweighed the fettered black bodies and souls in the scale of achievement.
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