Instances almost innumerable might be furnished in the history of
every age, illustrating the blunting of sympathies, and the total
transformation of character wrought in individuals by the exercise of
arbitrary power. Not to detain the reader with long details, let a
single instance suffice.

Perhaps no man has lived in modern times, whose name excites such
horror as that of Robespierre. Yet it is notorious that he was
naturally of a benevolent disposition, and tender sympathies.

"Before the revolution, when as a judge in his native city of Arras he
had to pronounce judgment on an assassin, he took no food for two days
afterwards, but was heard frequently exclaiming, 'I am sure he was
guilty; he is a villain; but yet, to put a human being to death!!' He
could not support the idea; and that the same necessity might not
recur, he relinquished his judicial office.--(See Laponneray's Life of
Robespierre, p. 8.) Afterwards, in the Convention of 1791, he urged
strongly the abolition of the punishment of death; and yet, for
sixteen months, in 1793 and 1794, till he perished himself by the same
guillotine which he had so mercilessly used on others, no one at Paris
consigned and caused so many fellow-creatures to be put to death by
it, with more ruthless insensibility."--_Turner's Sacred history of
the World_, vol. 2 p. 119.

But it is time we had done with the objection, "such cruelties are
INCREDIBLE." If the objector still reiterates it, he shall have the
last word without farther molestation.

An objection kindred to the preceding now claims notice. It is the
profound induction that slaves _must_ be well treated because
_slaveholders say they are!_

OBJECTION. II.--'SLAVEHOLDERS PROTEST THAT THEY TREAT THEIR SLAVES
WELL.'

Self-justification is human nature; self-condemnation is a sublime
triumph over it, and as rare as sublime. What culprits would be
convicted, if their own testimony were taken by juries as good
evidence? Slaveholders are on trial, charged with cruel treatment to
their slaves, and though in their own courts they can clear themselves
_by their own oaths_,[21] they need not think to do it at the bar of
the world. The denial of crimes, by men accused of them, goes for
nothing as evidence in all _civilized_ courts; while the voluntary
confession of them, is the best evidence possible, as it is testimony
_against themselves_, and in the face of the strongest motives to
conceal the truth. On the