their crouching vassals to accost them thus.
When did not vice lay claim to those virtues which
are the opposites of its habitual crimes? The
guilty, according to their own showing, are always
innocent, and cowards brave, and drunkards sober,
and harlots chaste, and pickpockets honest to a fault.
Every body understands this. When a man’s
tongue grows thick, and he begins to hiccough and
walk cross-legged, we expect him, as a matter of course,
to protest that he is not drunk; so when a man is always
singing the praises of his own honesty, we instinctively
watch his movements and look out for our pocket-books.
Whoever is simple enough to be hoaxed by such professions,
should never be trusted in the streets without somebody
to take care of him. Human nature works out in
slaveholders just as it does to other men, and in
American slaveholders just as in English, French,
Turkish, Algerine, Roman and Grecian. The Spartans
boasted of their kindness to their slaves, while they
whipped them to death by thousands at the altars of
their gods. The Romans lauded their own mild
treatment of their bondmen, while they branded their
names on their flesh with hot irons, and when old,
threw them into their fish ponds, or like Cato “the
Just,” starved them to death. It is the
boast of the Turks that they treat their slaves as
though they were their children, yet their common
name for them is “dogs,” and for the merest
trifles, their feet are bastinadoed to a jelly, or
their heads clipped off with the scimetar. The
Portuguese pride themselves on their gentle bearing
toward their slaves, yet the streets of Rio Janeiro
are filled with naked men and women yoked in pairs
to carts and wagons, and whipped by drivers like beasts
of burden.
Slaveholders, the world over, have sung the praises
of their tender mercies towards their slaves.
Even the wretches that plied the African slave trade,
tried to rebut Clarkson’s proofs of their cruelties,
by speeches, affidavits, and published pamphlets,
setting forth the accommodations of the “middle
passage,” and their kind attentions to the comfort
of those whom they had stolen from their homes, and
kept stowed away under hatches, during a voyage of
four thousand miles. So, according to the testimony
of the autocrat of the Russias, he exercises great
clemency towards the Poles, though he exiles them by
thousands to the snows of Siberia, and tramples them
down by millions, at home. Who discredits the
atrocities perpetrated by Ovando in Hispaniola, Pizarro
in Peru, and Cortez in Mexico,—because they
filled the ears of the Spanish Court with protestations
of their benignant rule? While they were yoking
the enslaved natives like beasts to the draught, working
them to death by thousands in their mines, hunting
them with bloodhounds, torturing them on racks, and
broiling them on beds of coals, their representations
to the mother country teemed with eulogies of their
parental sway! The bloody atrocities of Philip
II, in the expulsion of his Moorish subjects, are