they think to
bandage our eyes with such thin gauzes? Protesting their kind regard
for those whom they hourly plunder of all they have and all they get!
What! when they have seized their victims, and annihilated all their
_rights_, still claim to be the special guardians of their
_happiness_! Plunderers of their liberty, yet the careful suppliers of
their wants? Robbers of their earnings, yet watchful sentinels round
their interests, and kind providers for their comfort? Filching all
their time, yet granting generous donations for rest and sleep?
Stealing the use of their muscles, yet thoughtful of their ease?
Putting them under _drivers_, yet careful that they are not
hard-pushed? Too humane forsooth to stint the stomachs of their
slaves, yet force their _minds_ to starve, and brandish over them
pains and penalties, if they dare to reach forth for the smallest
crumb of knowledge, even a letter of the alphabet!

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, an