Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 by Harriet Beecher Stowe
page 75 of 409 (18%)
page 75 of 409 (18%)
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you from this book. I have never read any thing more strikingly
illustrative or condemnatory of the system we are here to denounce. Here is the judgment pronounced by one of the judges in North Carolina. It is impossible to read this judgment, however terrible the conclusion, without feeling convinced that the man who pronounced it was a man of a great mind, and, in spite of the law he was bound to administer, a man of a great heart. [Hear, hear!] Hear what he says. The case was this: It was a 'case of appeal,' in which the defendant had hired a slave woman for a year. During this time she committed some slight offence, for which the defendant undertook to chastise her. After doing so he shot at her as she was running away. The question then arose, was he justified in using that amount of coercion? and whether the privilege of shooting was not confined to the actual proprietor? The case was argued at some length, and the court, in pronouncing judgment, began by deploring that any judge should ever be called upon to decide such a case, but he had to administer the law, and not to make it. The judge said, 'With whatever reluctance, therefore, the court is bound to express the opinion, that the dominion over a slave in Carolina has not, as it has been argued, any analogy with the authority of a tutor over a pupil, of a master over an apprentice, or of a parent over a child. The court does not recognize these applications. There is no likeness between them. They are in opposition to each other, and there is an impassable gulf between them. The difference is that which exists between freedom and slavery--[Hear, hear!]--and a greater difference cannot be imagined. In the one case, the end in view is the happiness of the youth, born to equal rights with the tutor, whose duty it is to train the young to usefulness by moral and intellectual instruction. If they will not suffice, a moderate chastisement maybe administered. But with slavery it is far otherwise.' Mark these words, for they contain the whole thing. But with slavery it is far otherwise. The end is the profit of the |
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