d when old, threw them into
their fish ponds, or like Cato "the Just," starved them to death. It
is the boast of the Turks that they treat their slaves as though they
were their children, yet their common name for them is "dogs," and for
the merest trifles, their feet are bastinadoed to a jelly, or their
heads clipped off with the scimetar. The Portuguese pride themselves
on their gentle bearing toward their slaves, yet the streets of Rio
Janeiro are filled with naked men and women yoked in pairs to carts
and wagons, and whipped by drivers like beasts of burden.

Slaveholders, the world over, have sung the praises of their tender
mercies towards their slaves. Even the wretches that plied the African
slave trade, tried to rebut Clarkson's proofs of their cruelties, by
speeches, affidavits, and published pamphlets, setting forth the
accommodations of the "middle passage," and their kind attentions to
the comfort of those whom they had stolen from their homes, and kept
stowed away under hatches, during a voyage of four thousand miles. So,
according to the testimony of the autocrat of the Russias, he
exercises great clemency towards the Poles, though he exiles them by
thousands to the snows of Siberia, and tramples them down by millions,
at home. Who discredits the atrocities perpetrated by Ovando in
Hispaniola, Pizarro in Peru, and Cortez in Mexico,--because they
filled the ears of the Spanish Court with protestations of their
benignant rule? While they were yoking the enslaved natives like
beasts to the draught, working them to death by thousands in their
mines, hunting them with bloodhounds, torturing them on racks, and
broiling them on beds of coals, their representations to the mother
country teemed with eulogies of their parental sway! The bloody
atrocities of Philip II, in the expulsion of his Moorish subjects, are
matters of imperishable history. Who disbelieves or doubts them? And
yet his courtiers magnified his virtues and chanted his clemency and
his mercy, while the wail of a million victims, smitten down by a
tempest of fire and slaughter let loose at his bidding, rose above the
_Te Deums_ that thundered from all Spain's cathedrals. When Louis XIV.
revoked the edict of Nantz, and proclaimed two millions of his
subjects free plunder for persecution,--when from the English channel
to the Pyrennees the mangled bodies of the Protestants were dragged on
reeking hurdles by a shouting populace, he claimed to be "the f