Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/46

34 red-hot iron on the breast, or the shoulder, the arm, the forehead, or the cheek, though the Roman law forbid it fifteen centuries ago. They are disfigured and mutilated, now by the madness of anger, then by the jealous malice of revenge; their backs and sides scored with the lash, or bruised with the "paddle," bear marks of the violence needful to subdue manhood still smouldering in the ashes of the negro slave. Drive Nature out with whips and brands—she will come back. These abuses can be proved from descriptions of run-aways in the newspapers of the South.

The slave-holder's temptation to cruelty is too much for common men. His power is irresponsible. "'Tis easy to find a stick if you would beat a dog. The lash is always at hand; if a slave disobeys,—the whip; if he is idle,—the whip; does he murmur,—the whip; is he sullen and silent,—the whip; is the female coy and reluctant,—the whip. Chains and dungeons also are at hand. The slave is a thing; judge and jury no friends to him. The condition of the weak is bad enough everywhere, in Old England and in New England. But when the strong owns the very bodies of the weak, making and executing the laws as he will—it is not hard to see to what excess their wrongs will amount, wrongs which cannot be told.

It is often said that the evils of slavery are exaggerated. This is said by the masters. But the story of the victim when told by his oppressor—it is well known what that is. The few slaves who can tell the story of their wrongs, show that slavery cannot easily be represented as worse than it is. Imagination halts behind the fact. The lives of Moses Roper, of Lunsford Lane, of Moses Grundy, Frederic Douglas, and W. W. Brown, are before the public, and prove what could easily be learned from the advertisements of Southern newspapers, conjectured from the laws of the Southern States, or foretold outright from a knowledge of human nature itself:—that the sufferings of three millions of slaves form a mass of misery which the imagination can never realize, till the eye is familiar with its terrible details. Governor Giles, of Virginia, calls slavery "a punishment of the highest order." And Mr Preston says, "Happiness is incompatible with slavery."

In the most important of all relations, that of man and