servile employments, repulsive food, and squalid hovels, their purchase and sale, and use as brutes—­all these associations, constantly mingling and circulating in the minds of slaveholders, and inveterated by the hourly irritations which must assail all who use human beings as things, produce in them a permanent state of feeling toward the slave, made up of repulsion and settled ill-will.  When we add to this the corrosions produced by the petty thefts of slaves, the necessity of constant watching, their reluctant service, and indifference to their master’s interests, their ill concealed aversion to him, and spurning of his authority; and finally, that fact, as old as human nature, that men always hate those whom they oppress, and oppress those whom they hate, thus oppression and hatred mutually begetting and perpetuating each other—­and we have a raging compound of fiery elements and disturbing forces, so stimulating and inflaming the mind of the slaveholder against the slave, that it cannot but break forth upon him with desolating fury.

To deny that cruelty is the spontaneous and uniform product of arbitrary power, and that the natural and controlling tendency of such power is to make its possessor cruel, oppressive, and revengeful towards those who are subjected to his control, is, we repeat, to set at nought the combined experience of the human race, to invalidate its testimony, and to reverse its decisions from time immemorial.

A volume might be filled with the testimony of American slaveholders alone, to the truth of the preceding position.  We subjoin a few illustrations, and first, the memorable declaration of President Jefferson, who lived and died a slaveholder.  It has been published a thousand times, and will live forever.  In his “Notes on Virginia,” sixth Philadelphia edition, p. 251, he says,—­

“The WHOLE COMMERCE between master and slave, is a PERPETUAL EXERCISE of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting DESPOTISM on the one part, and degrading submission on the other.....  The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, GIVES LOOSE TO THE WORST OF PASSIONS; and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.”

Hon. Lewis Summers, Judge of the General Court of Virginia, and a slaveholder, said in a speech before the Virginia legislature in 1832; (see Richmond Whig of Jan. 26, 1832,)

“A slave population exercises the most pernicious influence upon the manners, habits and character, of those among whom it exists.  Lisping infancy learns the vocabulary of abusive epithets, and struts the embryo tyrant of its little domain.  The consciousness of superior destiny takes possession of his mind at its earliest dawning, and love of power and rule, ’grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength.’  Unless enabled to rise above the operation of those powerful causes, he enters the world with miserable notions of self-importance, and under the government of an unbridled temper.”