It is no marvel that slaveholders are always talking of their kind treatment of their slaves.  The only marvel is, that men of sense can be gulled by such professions.  Despots always insist that they are merciful.  The greatest tyrants that ever dripped with blood have assumed the titles of “most gracious,” “most clement,” “most merciful,” &c., and have ordered 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