you no questions, but merely tell you what _you know_, when we
say that men and women who can habitually do such things to human
beings, _can do_ ANY THING _to them_.

The declarations of slaveholders, that they treat their slaves well,
will put no man in a quandary, who keeps in mind this simple
principle, that the state of mind towards others, which leads one to
inflict cruelties on them _blinds the inflicter to the real nature of
his own acts_. To him, they do not _seem_ to be cruelties;
consequently, when speaking of such treatment toward such persons, he
will protest that it is not cruelty; though if inflicted upon himself
or his friends, he would indignantly stigmatize it as atrocious
barbarity. The objector equally overlooks another every-day fact of
human nature, which is this, that cruelties invariably cease to _seem_
cruelties when the _habit_ is formed though previously the mind
regarded them as such, and shrunk from them with horror.

The following fact, related by the late lamented THOMAS PRINGLE, whose
Life and Poems have published in England, is an appropriate
illustration. Mr. Pringle states it on the authority of Captain W. F.
Owen, of the Royal Navy.

"When his Majesty's ships, the Leven and the Barracouta, employed in
surveying the coast of Africa, were at Mozambique, in 1823, the
officers were introduced to the family of Senor Manuel Pedro
d'Almeydra, a native of Portugal, who was a considerable merchant
settled on that coast; and it was an opinion agreed in by all, that
Donna Sophia d'Almeydra was the most superior woman they had seen
since they left England, Captain Owen, the leader of the expedition,
expressing to Senor d'Almeydra his detestation of slavery, the Senor
replied, 'You will not be long here before you change your sentiments.
Look at my Sophia there. Before she would marry me, she made me
promise that I should give up the slave trade. When we first settled
at Mozambique, she was continually interceding for the slaves, and she
_constantly wept when I punished them_; and now she is among the
slaves front morning to night; she regulates the whole of my slave
establishment; she inquires into every offence committed by them,
pronounces sentence upon the offender, and _stands by and sees them
punished_.'

"To this, Mr. Pringle, who was himself for six years a resident of the
English settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, adds, 'The writer of this
article has seen, in the course of five or