will.  If a man’s will be resisted by one far below him, the provocation is vastly greater, than when it is resisted by an acknowledged superior.  In the former case, it inflames strong passions, which in the latter lie dormant.  The rage of proud Haman knew no bounds against the poor Jew who would not do as he wished, and so he built a gallows for him.  If the person opposing the will of another, be so far below him as to be on a level with chattels, and be actually held and used as an article of property; pride, scorn, lust of power, rage and revenge explode together upon the hapless victim.  The idea of property having a will, and that too in opposition to the will of its owner, and counteracting it, is a stimulant of terrible power to the most relentless human passions and from the nature of slavery, and the constitution of the human mind, this fierce stimulant must, with various degrees of strength, act upon slaveholders almost without ceasing.  The slave, however abject and crushed, is an intelligent being:  he has a will, and that will cannot be annihilated, it will show itself; if for a moment it is smothered, like pent up fires when vent is found, it flames the fiercer.  Make intelligence property, and its manager will have his match; he is met at every turn by an opposing will, not in the form of down-right rebellion and defiance, but yet, visibly, an ever-opposing will.  He sees it in the dissatisfied look, and reluctant air and unwilling movement; the constrained strokes of labor, the drawling tones, the slow hearing, the feigned stupidity, the sham pains and sickness, the short memory; and he feels it every hour, in innumerable forms, frustrating his designs by a ceaseless though perhaps invisible countermining.  This unceasing opposition to the will of its ‘owner,’ on the part of his rational ‘property,’ is to the slaveholder as the hot iron to the nerve.  He raves under it, and storms, and gnashes, and smites; but the more he smites, the hotter it gets, and the more it burns him.  Further, this opposition of the slave’s will to his owner’s, not only excites him to severity, that he may gratify his rage, but makes it necessary for him to use violence in breaking down this resistance—­thus subjecting the slave to additional tortures.  There is another inducement to cruel inflictions upon the slave, and a necessity for it, which does not exist in the case of brutes.  Offenders must be made an example to others, to strike them with terror.  If a slave runs away and is caught, his master flogs him with terrible severity, not merely to gratify his resentment, and to keep him from running away again, but as a warning to others.  So in every case of disobedience, neglect, stubbornness, unfaithfulness, indolence, insolence, theft, feigned sickness, when his directions are forgotten, or slighted, or supposed to be, or his wishes crossed, or his property injured, or left exposed, or his work ill-executed, the master is tempted to inflict cruelties, not merely to wreak his own vengeance upon him, and to make the slave more circumspect in future, but to sustain his authority over the other slaves, to restrain them from like practices, and to preserve his own property.