PREFACE. v

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” become published. We believe—it is
already evident, in fact—that the dissemination of this work
throughout America will effect what “La Picciola’ elsewhere
effected against tyranny less complete and vile. It will sap the
foundations of an institution which has prospered amid tempests
of indignant eloquence; and we prophesy that what has been
denied to Justice, contrary to the lowest instincts of brute com-
passion, will now be resigned, bit by bit, at the shrine of Respec-
tability. Wherever the book is read—and thousands of copies
are already quietly at work in thousands of homes—contempt for
the upholders of slavery must follow. Now contempt, unlike
indignation, is a weapon impossible to parry ; it loses little of its
force by being struck from a distance; and, in a good cause,
spreads like contagion. Therefore the sooner the story is circu-
lated in every colony and village where English, can be read, the
sooner must the dread realities it chronicles become mere tradi-
tions to wonder over.

Until, however, this consummation be effected in so far as she
is criminal, it is vain to assert for the republic of the United
States greatness, or any share in the progress of the world. Com-
mercial greatness we are willing to allow her; but prosperous
infamy is not palliated infamy, and cruelty imbibes no virtue
from purple and fine linen. It may or may not be great to be
powerful and rich, according as the question is approached from
earth or heaven; but when increase grows from tears and blood,
when power is subserved by crushing into the hearts of thousands
all those feelings and impulses by which men are known to be
the children of an Almighty Father—to prove that greatness we
must view it neither from earth nor heaven. Nor is the world
progressed by destroying in certain. races both the power and the
motive for advancergent—by depriving them even of their right
to their children, and their wives and daughters of the right of
being virtuous—by heaping upon them such indignities that they
themselves resign all pretensions to manhood and immortal