[Footnote 21:  The law of which the following is an extract, exists in South Carolina.  “If any slave shall suffer in life, limb or member, when no white person shall be present, or being present, shall refuse to give evidence, the owner or other person, who shall have the care of such slave, and in whose power such slave shall be, shall be deemed guilty of such offence, unless such owner or other person shall make the contrary appear by good and sufficient evidence, or shall BY HIS OWN OATH CLEAR AND EXCULPATE HIMSELF.  Which oath every court where such offence shall be tried, is hereby compared to administer, and to acquit the offender, if clear proof of the offence be not made by two witnesses at least.”—­2 Brevard’s Digest, 242.  The state of Louisiana has a similar law.]

The sincerity of those worthies, no one calls in question; their real notions of their own merits doubtless ascended into the sublime:  but for aught that appears, they had not the arrogance to demand that their own notions of their personal excellence, should be taken as the proof of it.  Not so with our slaveholders.  Not content with offering incense at the shrine of their own virtues, they have the effrontery to demand, that the rest of the world shall offer it, because they do; and shall implicitly believe the presiding divinity to be a good Spirit rather than a Devil, because they call him so!  In other words, since slaveholders profoundly appreciate their own gentle dispositions toward their slaves, and their kind treatment of them, and everywhere protest that they do truly show forth these rare excellencies, they demand that the rest of the world shall not only believe that they think so, but that they think rightly; that these notions of themselves are true, that their taking off their hats to themselves proves them worthy of homage, and that their assumption of the titles of, ‘Flower of Kindness,’ and ’Nutmeg of Consolation,’ is conclusive evidence that they deserve such appellations!

Was there ever a more ridiculous doctrine, than that a man’s opinion of his own actions is the true standard for measuring them, and the certificate of their real qualities!—­that his own estimate of his treatment of others; is to be taken as the true one, and such treatment be set down as good treatment upon the strength of his judgment.  He who argues the good treatment of the slave, from the slaveholder’s good opinion of such treatment, not only argues against human nature and all history, his own common sense, and even the testimony of his senses, but refutes his own arguments by his daily practice.  Every body acts on the presumption that men’s feelings will vary with their practices; that the light in which they view individuals and classes, and their feelings towards them, will modify their opinions of the treatment which they receive.  In any case of treatment that affects himself, his church, or his political party, no man so stultifies himself as to argue that such treatment must be good, because the author of it thinks so.