cious," "most clement," "most
merciful," &c., and have ordered their crouching vassals to accost
them thus. When did not vice lay claim to those virtues which are the
opposites of its habitual crimes? The guilty, according to their own
showing, are always innocent, and cowards brave, and drunkards sober,
and harlots chaste, and pickpockets honest to a fault. Every body
understands this. When a man's tongue grows thick, and he begins to
hiccough and walk cross-legged, we expect him, as a matter of course,
to protest that he is not drunk; so when a man is always singing the
praises of his own honesty, we instinctively watch his movements and
look out for our pocket-books. Whoever is simple enough to be hoaxed
by such professions, should never be trusted in the streets without
somebody to take care of him. Human nature works out in slaveholders
just as it does to other men, and in American slaveholders just as in
English, French, Turkish, Algerine, Roman and Grecian. The Spartans
boasted of their kindness to their slaves, while they whipped them to
death by thousands at the altars of their gods. The Romans lauded
their own mild treatment of their bondmen, while they branded their
names on their flesh with hot irons, and 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 trampl