[142] This fact is of itself a sufficient answer to the as. sumption of Carlyle and others, that what they call ‘the ruin of the colonies’ has been produced by the emancipation acts of 1833 and 1838.
We have no fears whatever of the effect of this literary monstrosity, which we have been considering, upon the British colonies. Quashee, black and ignorant as he may be, will not ‘get himself made a slave again.’ The mission of the ‘beneficent whip’ is there pretty well over; and it may now find its place in museums and cabinets of ghastly curiosities, with the racks, pillories, thumbscrews, and branding-irons of old days. What we have feared, however, is, that the advocates and defenders of slave-holding in this country might find in this discourse matter of encouragement, and that our antichristian prejudices against the colored man might be strengthened and confirmed by its malignant vituperation and sarcasm. On this point we have sympathized with the forebodings of an eloquent writer in the London Enquirer:—
‘We cannot imagine a more deadly moral poison for the American people than his [Carlyle's] last composition. Every cruel practice of social exclusion will derive from it new sharpness and venom. The slave-holder, of course, will exult to find himself, not apologized for, but enthusiastically cheered, upheld, and glorified, by a writer of European celebrity. But it is not merely the slave who will feel Mr. Carlyle's hand in the torture of his flesh, the riveting of his fetters, and the denial of light to his mind. The free black will feel him, ’
