the Hudson. Or, in your self-will, you will do just as you please. (Great
laughter.)

[A word on the subject of divorce. One of your standing denunciations on
the South is the terrible laxity of the marriage vow among the slaves.
Well, sir, what does your Boston Dr. Nehemiah Adams say? He says, after
giving eighty, sixty, and the like number of applications for divorce, and
nearly all granted at individual quarterly courts in New England,--he says
he is not sure but that the marriage relation is as enduring among _the
slaves in the South_ as it is among white people in New England. I only
give what Dr. Adams says. I would fain vindicate the marriage relation
from this rebuke. But one thing I will say: you seldom hear of a divorce
in Virginia or South Carolina.]

But to proceed:--

Do you say the slave is _sold and bought?_ So is the wife the world over.
Everywhere, always, and now as the general fact, however done away or
modified by Christianity. The savage buys her. The barbarian buys her. The
Turk buys her. The Jew buys her. The Christian buys her,--Greek, Armenian,
Nestorian, Roman Catholic, Protestant. The Portuguese, the Spaniard, the
Italian, the German, the Russian, the Frenchman, the Englishman, the New
England man, the New Yorker,--especially the upper ten,--_buy the
wife_--in many, very many cases. She is seldom bought in the South, and
never among the slaves themselves; for they always marry for love.
(Continued laughter.) Sir, I say the wife is bought in the highest
circles, too often, as really as the slave is bought. Oh, she is not sold
and purchased in the public market. But come, sir, with me, and let us
take the privilege of spirits out of the body to glide into that gilded
saloon, or into that richly comfortable family room, of cabinets, and