vice who thinks _that_ a proof that the slaves _are_ well treated.
The whole history of man is a record of real interests sacrificed to
present gratification. If all men's actions were consistent with their
best interests, folly and sin would be words without meaning.

If the objector means that it is for the pecuniary interests of
masters to treat their slaves well, and thence infers their good
treatment, we reply, that though the love of money is strong, yet
appetite and lust, pride, anger and revenge, the love of power and
honor, are each an overmatch for it; and when either of them is roused
by a sudden stimulant, the love of money worsted in the grapple with
it. Look at the hourly lavish outlays of money to procure a momentary
gratification for those passions and appetites. As the desire for
money is, in the main, merely a desire for the means of gratifying
_other_ desires, or rather for one of the means, it must be the
_servant_ not the sovereign of those desires, to whose gratification
its only use is to minister. But even if the love of money were the
strongest human passion, who is simple enough to believe that it is
all the time so powerfully excited, that no other passion or appetite
can get the mastery 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