He also threw away all his immense power because he could not arrest his own course or limit his own demands on fate. Such ambitions cannot stop, so long as there is anything unconquered or unpossessed. "All this avails me nothing, so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's gate." The madness which seizes those greedy of power is like the passion of the gamester, who is unable to limit his desire of gain. By this law of insatiable ambition Providence equalizes destinies, and power is prevented from being consolidated in a few hands. The motive which actuates these ambitions, and makes them think that nothing is gained so long as anything remains to be gained, seems to be a secret fear that they are in danger of losing all unless they can obtain more. This inward dread appears to have possessed the hearts of the Southern slaveholders. Since slavery has been abolished, many of them admit that they have more content in their present poverty than they formerly had in their large possessions. They were then sensitive to every suggestion which touched their institution. Hence their persecution of Abolitionists, hence their cruelty to the slaves themselves,--for cruelty is often the child of fear. Hence the atrocity of the slave laws. Hence the desire to secure more and larger guaranties from the United States for their institution. Every rumor in the air troubled them. The fact that antislavery opinion existed at the North, that it was continually increasing, that a great political party was growing up which was opposed to their system, that such men as Garrison and Wendell Phillips existed in Boston, that Seward and Sumner were in the Senate,--all this was intolerable. The only way of accounting for Southern irritability, for Southern aggressions, for its perpetual demand for more power, is to be found in this latent terror. They doubted whether the foundations of their whole system were not rotten; they feared that it rested on falsehood and lies; they secretly felt that it was contrary to the will of God; an instinct in their souls told them that it was opposed to the spirit of the age and the laws of progress; and this fear made them frantic.