On the record
The “least” do not “feel its care,” but tremble and wail beneath its cruelty; while the “greatest” and the strongest are “exempt from its power;” for they made it not for themselves but for others.
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gutenberg.orgEditor's note · Context
Mann highlights the disparity in how the law affects different classes, emphasizing its cruelty towards the vulnerable.
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The general system of slaveholding farmers and planters, in all times and places, has been, and now is, and ever will be, to cultivate much land, badly, for present gain,--in short, to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
Behind these forty-one indictments for stealing stand drawn up, in battle array, against this same prisoner, seventy-four other indictments for transporting the very slaves whom he is charged to have stolen.
Not the most fertile soil, not mines of silver and gold, can make a nation rich, without intelligence.
So far as legal rights against his oppressors are concerned, the slave lives in such a world of darkness.
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