and muscles, of all their time, liberty, and earnings, of the free exercise of choice, of the rights of marriage and parental authority, of legal protection, of the right to be, to do, to go, to stay, to think, to feel, to work, to rest, to eat, to sleep, to learn, to teach, to earn money, and to expend it, to visit, and to be visited, to speak, to be silent, to worship according to conscience, in fine, their right to be protected by just and equal laws, and to be amenable to such only.  Of all these rights the slaves are plundered; and this is a part of that “good treatment” of which their plunderers boast!  What then is the rest of it?  The above is enough for a sample, at least a specimen-brick from the kiln.  Reader, we ask you no questions, but merely tell you what you know, when we say that men and women who can habitually do such things to human beings, can do ANY THING to them.

The declarations of slaveholders, that they treat their slaves well, will put no man in a quandary, who keeps in mind this simple principle, that the state of mind towards others, which leads one to inflict cruelties on them blinds the inflicter to the real nature of his own acts.  To him, they do not seem to be cruelties; consequently, when speaking of such treatment toward such persons, he will protest that it is not cruelty; though if inflicted upon himself or his friends, he would indignantly stigmatize it as atrocious barbarity.  The objector equally overlooks another every-day fact of human nature, which is this, that cruelties invariably cease to seem cruelties when the habit is formed though previously the mind regarded them as such, and shrunk from them with horror.

The following fact, related by the late lamented THOMAS PRINGLE, whose Life and Poems have published in England, is an appropriate illustration.  Mr. Pringle states it on the authority of Captain W. F. Owen, of the Royal Navy.

“When his Majesty’s ships, the Leven and the Barracouta, employed in surveying the coast of Africa, were at Mozambique, in 1823, the officers were introduced to the family of Senor Manuel Pedro d’Almeydra, a native of Portugal, who was a considerable merchant settled on that coast; and it was an opinion agreed in by all, that Donna Sophia d’Almeydra was the most superior woman they had seen since they left England, Captain Owen, the leader of the expedition, expressing to Senor d’Almeydra his detestation of slavery, the Senor replied, ’You will not be long here before you change your sentiments.  Look at my Sophia there.  Before she would marry me, she made me promise that I should give up the slave trade.  When we first settled at Mozambique, she was continually interceding for the slaves, and she constantly wept when I punished them; and now she is among the slaves front morning to night; she regulates the whole of my slave establishment; she inquires into every offence committed by them, pronounces sentence upon the offender, and stands by and sees them punished.’