2.  Were there nothing else to prove it a system of monstrous cruelty, the fact that FEAR is the only motive with which the slave is plied during his whole existence, would be sufficient to brand it with execration as the grand tormentor of man.  The slave’s susceptibility of pain is the sole fulcrum on which slavery works the lever that moves him.  In this it plants all its stings; here it sinks its hot irons; cuts its deep gashes; flings its burning embers, and dashes its boiling brine and liquid fire:  into this it strikes its cold flesh hooks, grappling irons, and instruments of nameless torture; and by it drags him shrieking to the end of his pilgrimage.  The fact that the master inflicts pain upon the slave not merely as an end to gratify passion, but constantly as a means of extorting labor, is enough of itself to show that the system of slavery is unmixed cruelty.

3.  That the slaves must suffer frequent and terrible inflictions, follows inevitably from the character of those who direct their labor.  Whatever may be the character of the slaveholders themselves, all agree that the overseers are, as a class, most abandoned, brutal, and desperate men.  This is so well known and believed that any testimony to prove it seems needless.  The testimony of Mr. WIRT, late Attorney General of the United States, a Virginian and a slaveholder, is as follows.  In his life of Patrick Henry, p. 36, speaking of the different classes of society in Virginia, he says,—­“Last and lowest a feculum, of beings called ’overseers’—­the most abject, degraded, unprincipled race, always cap in hand to the dons who employ them, and furnishing materials for the exercise of their pride, insolence, and spirit of domination.”

Rev. PHINEAS SMITH, of Centreville, New-York, who has resided some years at the south, says of overseers—­

“It need hardly be added that overseers are in general ignorant, unprincipled and cruel, and in such low repute that they are not permitted to come to the tables of their employers; yet they have the constant control of all the human cattle that belong to the master.

“These men are continually advancing from their low station to the higher one of masters.  These changes bring into the possession of power a class of men of whose mental and moral qualities I have already spoken.”

Rev. HORACE MOULTON, Marlboro’, Massachusetts, who lived in Georgia several years, says of them,—­

“The overseers are generally loose in their morals; it is the object of masters to employ those whom they think will get the most work out of their hands,—­hence those who whip and torment the slaves the most are in many instances called the best overseers.  The masters think those whom the slaves fear the most are the best.  Quite a portion of the masters employ their own slaves as overseers, or rather they are called drivers; these are more subject to the will of the masters than the white overseers are; some of them are as lordly as an Austrian prince, and sometimes more cruel even than the whites.”