Now that slaveholders are proverbially hospitable to their guests, and spare neither pains nor expense in ministering to their accommodation and pleasure, is freely admitted and easily accounted for.  That those who make their inferiors work for them, without pay, should be courteous and hospitable to those of their equals and superiors whose good opinions they desire, is human nature in its every-day dress.  The objection consists of a fact and an inference:  the fact, that slaveholders have a special care to the accommodation of their guests; the inference, that therefore they must seek the comfort of their slaves—­that as they are bland and obliging to their equals, they must be mild and condescending to their inferiors—­that as the wrongs of their own grade excite their indignation, and their woes move their sympathies, they must be touched by those of their chattels—­that as they are full of pains-taking toward those whose good opinions and good offices they seek, they will, of course, show special attention to those to whose good opinions they are indifferent, and whose good offices they can compel—­that as they honor the literary and scientific, they must treat with high consideration those to whom they deny the alphabet—­that as they are courteous to certain persons, they must be so to “property”—­eager to anticipate the wishes of visitors, they cannot but gratify those of their vassals—­jealous for the rights of the Texans, quick to feel at the disfranchisement of Canadians and of Irishmen, alive to the oppressions of the Greeks and the Poles, they must feel keenly for their negroes! Such conclusions from such premises do not call for serious refutation.  Even a half-grown boy, who should argue, that because men have certain feelings toward certain persons in certain circumstances, they must have the same feelings toward all persons in all circumstances, or toward persons in opposite circumstances, of totally different grades, habits, and personal peculiarities, might fairly be set down as a hopeless simpleton:  and yet, men of sense and reflection on other subjects, seem bent upon stultifying themselves by just such shallow inferences from the fact, that slaveholders are hospitable and generous to certain persons in certain grades of society belonging to their own caste.  On the ground of this reasoning, all the crimes ever committed may be disproved, by showing, that their perpetrators were hospitable and generous to those who sympathized and co-operated with them.  To prove that a man does not hate one of his neighbors, it is only necessary to show that he loves another; to make it appear that he does not treat contemptuously the ignorant, he has only to show that he bows respectfully to the learned; to demonstrate that he does not disdain his inferiors, lord it over his dependents, and grind the faces of the poor, he need only show that he is polite to the rich, pays deference to titles and office,