To deny that cruelty is the spontaneous and uniform product of arbitrary power, and that the natural and controlling tendency of such power is to make its possessor cruel, oppressive, and revengeful towards those who are subjected to his control, is, we repeat, to set at nought the combined experience of the human race, to invalidate its testimony, and to reverse its decisions from time immemorial. A volume might be filled with the testimony of American slaveholders alone, to the truth of the preceding position. We subjoin a few illustrations, and first, the memorable declaration of President Jefferson, who lived and died a slaveholder. It has been published a thousand times, and will live forever. In his "Notes on Virginia," sixth Philadelphia edition, p. 251, he says,-- "The WHOLE COMMERCE between master and slave, is a PERPETUAL EXERCISE of the most _boisterous passions_, the most unremitting DESPOTISM on the one part, and degrading submission on the other..... The parent _storms_, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of _wrath_, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, GIVES LOOSE TO THE WORST OF PASSIONS; and thus _nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny,_ cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities." Hon. Lewis Summers, Judge of the General Court of Virginia, and a slaveholder, said in a speech before the Virginia legislature in 1832; (see Richmond Whig of Jan. 26, 1832,) "A slave population exercises _the most pernicious influence_ upon the manners, habits and character, of those among whom it exists. Lisping infancy learns the vocabulary of abusive epithets, and struts the _embryo tyrant_ of its little domain. The consciousness of superior destiny takes possession of his mind at its earliest dawning, and love of power and rule, 'grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength.' Unless enabled to rise above the operation of those powerful causes, he enters the world with miserable notions of self-importance, and under the government of an unbridled temper." The late JUDGE TUCKER of Virginia, a slaveholder, and Professor of Law in the University of William and Mary, in his "Letter to a Member of the Virginia Legislature," 1801, says,-- "I say nothing of the baneful effects of slavery on our _moral character_, because I know you have been long sensible of this point." The Presbyterian Synod of South Carolina and Georgia, consisting of all the clergy of that denomination in those states, with a lay representation from the churches, most, if not all of whom are slaveholders, published a report on slavery in 1834, from which the following is an extract.