As the desire for money is, in the main, merely a desire for the means of gratifying other desires, or rather for one of the means, it must be the servant not the sovereign of those desires, to whose gratification its only use is to minister.  But even if the love of money were the strongest human passion, who is simple enough to believe that it is all the time so powerfully excited, that no other passion or appetite can get the mastery over it?  Who does not know that gusts of rage, revenge, jealousy and lust drive it before them as a tempest tosses a feather?

The objector has forgotten his first lessons; they taught him that it is human nature to gratify the uppermost passion:  and is prudence the uppermost passion with slaveholders, and self-restraint their great characteristic?  The strongest feeling of any moment is the sovereign of that moment, and rules.  Is a propensity to practice economy the predominant feeling with slaveholders?  Ridiculous!  Every northerner knows that slaveholders are proverbial for lavish expenditures, never higgling about the price of a gratification.  Human passions have not, like the tides, regular ebbs and flows, with their stationary, high and low water marks.  They are a dominion convulsed with revolutions; coronations and dethronements in ceasless succession—­each ruler a usurper and a despot.  Love of money gets a snatch at the sceptre as well as the rest, not by hereditary right, but because, in the fluctuations of human feelings, a chance wave washes him up to the throne, and the next perhaps washes him off without time to nominate his successor.  Since, then, as a matter of fact, a host of appetites and passions do hourly get the better of love of money, what protection does the slave find in his master’s interest, against the sweep of his passions and appetites?  Besides, a master can inflict upon his slave horrible cruelties without perceptibly injuring his health, or taking time from his labor, or lessening his value as property.  Blows with a small stick give more acute pain, than with a large one.  A club bruises, and benumbs the nerves, while a switch, neither breaking nor bruising the flesh, instead of blunting the sense of feeling, wakes up and stings to torture all the susceptibilities of pain.  By this kind of infliction, more actual cruelty can be perpetrated in the giving of pain at the instant, than by the most horrible bruisings and lacerations; and that, too, with little comparative hazard to the slave’s health, or to his value as property, and without loss of time from labor.  Even giving to the objection all the force claimed for it, what protection is it to the slave?  It professes to shield the slave from such treatment alone, as would either lay him aside from labor, or injure his health, and thus lessen his value as a working animal, making him a damaged article in the market.  Now, is nothing bad treatment of a human being except that which produces these effects?  Does the fact that a man’s constitution is not actually shattered, and his life shortened by his treatment, prove that he is treated well?  Is no treatment cruel except what sprains muscles, or cuts sinews, or bursts blood vessels, or breaks bones, and thus lessens a man’s value as a working animal?