rses or hounds refuse to do, or
their pigs refuse to go where they wish to drive them, but the feeling
is rarely intense and never permanent. It is vexation and impatience,
rather than settled rage, malignity, or revenge. If horses and dogs
were intelligent beings, and still held as property, their opposition
to the wishes of their owners, would exasperate them immeasurably more
than it would be possible for them to do, with the minds of brutes.
None but little children and idiots get angry at sticks and stones
that lie in their way or hurt them; but put into sticks and stones
intelligence, and will, and power of feeling and motion, while they
remain as now, articles of property, and what a towering rage would
men be in, if bushes whipped them in the face when they walked among
them, or stones rolled over their toes when they climbed hills! and
what exemplary vengeance would be inflicted upon door-steps and
hearth-stones, if they were to move out of their places, instead of
lying still where they were put for their owners to tread upon. The
greatest provocation to human nature is _opposition to its will_. If a
man's will be resisted by one far _below_ him, the provocation is
vastly greater, than when it is resisted by an acknowledged superior.
In the former case, it inflames strong passions, which in the latter
lie dormant. The rage of proud Haman knew no bounds against the poor
Jew who would not do as he wished, and so he built a gallows for him.
If the person opposing the will of another, be so far below him as to
be on a level with chattels, and be actually held and used as an
article of property; pride, scorn, lust of power, rage and revenge
explode together upon the hapless victim. The idea of _property_
having a will, and that too in opposition to the will of its _owner_,
and counteracting it, is a stimulant of terrible power to the most
relentless human passions and from the nature of slavery, and the
constitution of the human mind, this fierce stimulant must, with
various degrees of strength, act upon slaveholders almost without
ceasing. The slave, however abject and crushed, is an intelligent
being: he has a _will_, and that will cannot be annihilated, _it will
show itself_; if for a moment it is smothered, like pent up fires when
vent is found, it flames the fiercer. Make intelligence _property_,
and its manager will have his match; he is met at every turn by an
_opposing will_, not in the form of down-right re