ave exercised great cruelty toward their slaves,
but have voluntarily, in their official acts, made proclamation of it
and entered it on their public records. The Legislature of North
Carolina, in 1798, branded the successive legislatures of that state
for more than thirty years previous, with the infamy of treatment
towards their slaves, which they pronounce to be 'disgraceful to
humanity, and degrading in the highest degree to the laws and
principles of a free, Christian, and enlightened country.' This
treatment was the enactment and perpetuation of a most barbarous and
cruel law.

But enough. As the objector can and does believe all the preceeding
facts, if he still '_can't_ believe' as to the cruelties of
slaveholders, it would be barbarous to tantalize his incapacity either
with evidence or argument. Let him have the benefit of the act in such
case made and provided.

Having shown that the incredulity of the objector respecting the
cruelty inflicted upon the slaves, is discreditable to his
consistency, we now proceed to show that it is equally so to his
_intelligence_.

Whoever disbelieves the foregoing statements of cruelties, on the
ground of their enormity, proclaims his own ignorance of the nature
and history of man. What! incredulous about the atrocities perpetrated
by those who hold human beings as property, to be used for their
pleasure, when history herself has done little else in recording human
deeds, than to dip her blank chart in the blood shed by arbitrary
power, and unfold to human gaze the great red scroll? That cruelty is
the natural effect of arbitrary power, has been the result of all
experience, and the voice of universal testimony since the world
began. Shall human nature's axioms, six thousand years old, go for
nothing? Are the combined product of human experience, and the
concurrent records of human character, to be set down as 'old wives'
fables?' To disbelieve that arbitrary power naturally and habitually
perpetrates cruelties, where it can do it with impunity, is not only
ignorance of man, but of _things_. It is to be blind to innumerable
proofs which are before every man's eyes; proofs that are stereotyped
in the very words and phrases that are on every one's lips. Take for
example the words _despot_ and _despotic_. Despot, signifies
etymologically, merely one who _possesses_ arbitrary power, and at
first, it was used to designate those alone who _possessed_ unlimited
power over human