the permanent feelings, the
settled _frame of mind_, cherished by the community upon those
subjects, and towards those persons and classes whose condition the
laws are designed to establish. If the laws are in a high degree cruel
and inhuman, towards any class of persons, it proves that the feelings
habitually exercised towards that class of persons, by those who make
and perpetuate those laws, are at least _equally_ cruel and inhuman.
We say _at least equally_ so; for if the _habitual_ state of feeling
towards that class be unmerciful, it must be unspeakably cruel,
relentless and malignant when _provoked_; if its _ordinary_ action is
inhuman, its contortions and spasms must be tragedies; if the waves
run high when there has been no wind, where will they not break when
the tempest heaves them!

Further, when cruelty is the _spirit_ of the law towards a proscribed
class, when it _legalizes great outrages_ upon them, it connives at,
and abets _greater_ outrages, and is virtually an accomplice of all
who perpetrate them. Hence, in such cases, though the _degree_ of the
outrage is illegal, the perpetrator will rarely be convicted, and,
even if convicted, will be almost sure to escape punishment. This is
not _theory_ but _history_. Every judge and lawyer in the slave states
_knows_, that the legal conviction and _punishment_ of masters and
mistresses, for illegal outrages upon their slaves, is an event which
has rarely, if ever, occurred in the slave states; they know, also,
that although _hundreds_ of slaves have been _murdered_ by their
masters and mistresses in the slave states, within the last
twenty-five years, and though the fact of their having committed those
murders has been established beyond a _doubt_ in the minds of the
surrounding community, yet that the murderers have not, in a single
instance, suffered the penalty of the law.

Finally, since slaveholders have deliberately legalized the
perpetration of the most cold-blooded atrocities upon their slaves,
and do pertinaciously refuse to make these atrocities _illegal_, and
to punish those who perpetrate them, they stand convicted before the
world, upon their own testimony, of the most barbarous, brutal, and
habitual inhumanity. If this be slander and falsehood, their own lips
have uttered it, their own fingers have written it, their own acts
have proclaimed it; and however it may be with their _morality_, they
have too much human nature to perjure themselves fo