But the horror and execration which this deed met with were no greater at the North than at the South.

It cannot be denied that slavery, as well as marriage, affords peculiar provocations and facilities for cruel deeds,--according to the doctrine of your friend and fellow-Sophomore.

But in which section there is the more of unpunished wickedness, I am slow to pronounce, for I do not wish to condemn my own people, nor to justify others in their sins.

An excellent minister in Cincinnati not long since preached a sermon on murder, in which he stated that "during his residence in that city, there had been more than one hundred murders, or an average of two a month, while in no instance had the perpetrator been executed." Reading lately of a husband at the North throwing oil of vitriol from a bottle, filled for the purpose, over his wife's face and neck, and of a Northern clergyman feeding his young wife, as she sat on his knee, with apple on which he had sprinkled arsenic, I questioned whether human nature were not about the same everywhere.

The theoretical right of a master, in certain cases, to put his slave to death, without judge or jury, is controlled by the self-interest of the owner who, of course, does not recklessly destroy his own property.