What an unreasonable creature! Does he
suppose me so lost to all due sense of humility as to take out of his
hands a cause which he is pleading so well? If the plantation slaves
had such a good friend as the Times, and if every over-worked female
cotton picker could write as clever letters as this dressmaker's
apprentice, and get them published in as influential papers, and
excite as general a sensation by them as this seems to have done, I
think I should feel that there was no need of my interfering in a work
so much better done. Unfortunately, our female cotton pickers do not
know how to read and write, and it is against the law to teach them;
and this instance shows that the law is a sagacious one, since,
doubtless, if they could read and write, most embarrassing
communications might be made.
Nothing shows more plainly, to my mind, than this letter, the
difference between the working class of England and the slave. The
free workman or workwoman of England or America, however poor, is
self-respecting; is, to some extent, clever and intelligent; is
determined to resist wrong, and, as this incident shows, has abundant
means for doing so.
When we shall see the columns of the Charleston Courier adorned with
communications from cotton pickers and slave seamstresses, we shall
then think the comparison a fair one. In fact, apart from the
whimsicality of the affair, and the little annoyance which one feels
at notoriety to which one is not accustomed, I consider the incident
as in some aspects a gratifying one, as showing how awake and active
are the sympathies of the British public with that much-oppressed
class of needlewomen.
Horace Greeley would be delighted could his labors in this line excite
a similar commotion in New York.
We dined to-day at the Duke of Argyle's. At dinner there were the
members of the family, the Duchess of Sutherland, Lord Carlisle, Lord
and Lady Blantyre, &c. The conversation flowed along in a very
agreeable channel. I told them the more I contemplated life in Great
Britain, the more I was struck with the contrast between the
comparative smallness of the territory and the vast power, physical,
moral, and intellectual, which it exerted in the world.
The Duchess of Sutherland added, that it was beautiful to observe how
gradually the idea of freedom had developed itself in the history of
the English nation, growing clearer and more distinct in every
successive century.
I might have added that the history of our own American republic is
but a continuation of the history of this development. The resistance
to the stamp act was of the same kind as the resistance to the ship
money; and in our revolutionary war there were as eloquent defences of
our principles and course heard in the British Parliament as echoed in
Faneuil Hall.
