Whoever disbelieves the foregoing statements of cruelties, on the ground of their enormity, proclaims his own ignorance of the nature and history of man.  What! incredulous about the atrocities perpetrated by those who hold human beings as property, to be used for their pleasure, when history herself has done little else in recording human deeds, than to dip her blank chart in the blood shed by arbitrary power, and unfold to human gaze the great red scroll?  That cruelty is the natural effect of arbitrary power, has been the result of all experience, and the voice of universal testimony since the world began.  Shall human nature’s axioms, six thousand years old, go for nothing?  Are the combined product of human experience, and the concurrent records of human character, to be set down as ‘old wives’ fables?’ To disbelieve that arbitrary power naturally and habitually perpetrates cruelties, where it can do it with impunity, is not only ignorance of man, but of things.  It is to be blind to innumerable proofs which are before every man’s eyes; proofs that are stereotyped in the very words and phrases that are on every one’s lips.  Take for example the words despot and despotic.  Despot, signifies etymologically, merely one who possesses arbitrary power, and at first, it was used to designate those alone who possessed unlimited power over human beings, entirely irrespective of the way in which they exercised it, whether mercifully or cruelly.  But the fact, that those who possessed such power, made their subjects their victims, has wrought a total change in the popular meaning of the word.  It now signifies, in common parlance, not one who possesses unlimited power over others, but one who exercises the power that he has, whether little or much, cruelly.  So despotic, instead of meaning what it once did, something pertaining to the possession of unlimited power, signifies something pertaining to the capricious, unmerciful and relentless exercise of such power.

The word tyrant, is another example—­formerly it implied merely a possession of arbitrary power, but from the invariable abuse of such power by its possessors, the proper and entire meaning of the word is lost, and it now signifies merely one who exercises power to the injury of others.  The words tyrannical and tyranny follow the same analogy.  So the word arbitrary; which formerly implied that which pertains to the will of one, independently of others; but from the fact that those who had no restraint upon their wills, were invariably capricious, unreasonable and oppressive, these words convey accurately the present sense of arbitrary, when applied to a person.

How can the objector persist in disbelieving that cruelty is the natural effect of arbitrary power, when the very words of every day, rise up on his lips in testimony against him—­words which once signified the mere possession of arbitrary power, but have lost their meaning, and now signify merely its cruel exercise; because such a use of it has been proved by the experience of the world, to be inseparable from its possession—­words now frigid with horror, and never used even by the objector without feeling a cold chill run over him.