stery over it? Who does not know that gusts of rage,
revenge, jealousy and lust drive it before them as a tempest tosses a
feather?

The objector has forgotten his first lessons; they taught him that it
is human nature to gratify the _uppermost_ passion: and is _prudence_
the uppermost passion with slaveholders, and self-restraint their
great characteristic? The strongest feeling of any moment is the
sovereign of that moment, and rules. Is a propensity to practice
_economy_ the predominant feeling with slaveholders? Ridiculous!
Every northerner knows that slaveholders are proverbial for lavish
expenditures, never higgling about the _price_ of a gratification.
Human passions have not, like the tides, regular ebbs and flows, with
their stationary, high and low water marks. They are a dominion
convulsed with revolutions; coronations and dethronements in ceasless
succession--each ruler a usurper and a despot. Love of money gets a
snatch at the sceptre as well as the rest, not by hereditary right,
but because, in the fluctuations of human feelings, a chance wave
washes him up to the throne, and the next perhaps washes him off
without time to nominate his successor. Since, then, as a matter of
fact, a host of appetites and passions do hourly get the better of
love of money, what protection does the slave find in his master's
_interest_, against the sweep of his passions and appetites? Besides,
a master can inflict upon his slave horrible cruelties without
perceptibly injuring his health, or taking time from his labor, or
lessening his value as property. Blows with a small stick give more
acute pain, than with a large one. A club bruises, and benumbs the
nerves, while a switch, neither breaking nor bruising the flesh,
instead of blunting the sense of feeling, wakes up and stings to
torture all the susceptibilities of pain. By this kind of infliction,
more actual cruelty can be perpetrated in the giving of pain at the
instant, than by the most horrible bruisings and lacerations; and
that, too, with little comparative hazard to the slave's health, or to
his value as property, and without loss of time from labor. Even
giving to the objection all the force claimed for it, what protection
is it to the slave? It _professes_ to shield the slave from such
treatment alone, as would either lay him aside from labor, or injure
his health, and thus lessen his value as a working animal, making him
a _damaged article_ in the market. Now, i