ated as though they did not possess them.

Another way in which the feelings of slaves are trifled with and often
deeply wounded, is by changing their names; if, at the time they are
brought into a family, there is another slave of the same name; or if
the owner happens, for some other reason, not to like the name of the
new comer. I have known slaves very much grieved at having the names
of their children thus changed, when they had been called after a dear
relation. Indeed it would be utterly impossible to recount the
multitude of ways in which the _heart_ of the slave is continually
lacerated by the total disregard of his feelings as a social being and
a human creature.

The slave suffers also greatly from being continually watched. The
system of espionage which is constantly kept up over slaves is the
most worrying and intolerable that can be imagined. Many mistresses
are, in fact, during the absence of their husbands, really their
drivers; and the pleasure of returning to their families often, on the
part of the husband, is entirely destroyed by the complaints preferred
against the slaves when he comes home to his meals.

A mistress of my acquaintance asked her servant boy, one day, what was
the reason she could not get him to do his work whilst his master was
away, and said to him, "Your master works a great deal harder than you
do; he is at his office all day, and often has to study his law cases
at night." "Master," said the boy, "is working for himself, and for
you, ma'am, but I am working for _him_". The mistress turned and
remarked to a friend, that she was so struck with the truth of the
remark, that she could not say a word to him. But I forbear--the
sufferings of the slaves are not only innumerable, but they are
_indescribable_. I may paint the agony of kindred torn from each
other's arms, to meet no more in time; I may depict the inflictions of
the blood-stained lash, but I cannot describe the daily, hourly,
ceaseless torture, endured by the heart that is constantly trampled
under the foot of despotic power. This is a part of the horrors of
slavery which, I believe, no one has ever attempted to delineate; I
wonder not at it, it mocks all power of language. Who can describe the
anguish of that mind which feels itself impaled upon the iron of
arbitrary power--its living, writhing, helpless victim! every human
susceptibility tortured, its sympathies torn, and stung, and
bleeding--always feeling the death-