black man shall have you." With much greater reason might "the white man," be represented as an object of terror to the poor little blacks, for white men have indeed inflicted cruel injuries on their unoffending race. Another degradation which the negro has to endure, is contempt of his country, than which nothing can be more galling to a generous mind. "Man, through all ages of revolving time, Is there no shed, whose peeping roof appears No land, whose name in exile heard, will dart Ice through his veins, and lightning through his heart!" The advocates of slavery have had the unblushing effrontery to declare that their system was based on humanity: that the victims of their oppression were torn by fraud and violence from their homes, and their native country, in order that they might thereby be placed in a happier and more eligible condition. "But who are you," it has been justly asked, "who pretend to judge of another man's happiness; that state which each man, under the guidance of his Maker, forms for himself, and not one for another?" To know what constitutes your happiness or mine, is the sole prerogative of Him who created us, and cast us in so various and different moulds. Did your slaves ever complain to you of unhappiness in their native woods and deserts? or, rather let me ask, did they ever cease complaining of their condition under you, their lordly masters, where they see, indeed, the accommodations of civilized life, but see them all pass to others, themselves unbenefited by them? Be so gracious then, ye petty tyrants over human freedom, as to let your slaves judge for themselves what it is that makes their own happiness, and then see whether they do not place it in the return to their own country, rather than in the contemplation of your grandeur, of which their misery makes so large a part; a return so passionately longed for, that, despairing of happiness here, that is, of escaping the chains of their cruel task-masters, they console themselves with feigning it to be the gracious reward of Heaven in their future state." "Be it so," was the more concise answer to the shallow pretext of the Africans being made happier by being carried to the West Indies, "Be it so; but we have no right to make people happy against their will." "Let it be admitted that the slave is treated with humanity, and placed in circumstances of comfort, allow even that he is pampered with delicacies, or put to rest on a bed of roses, he could not be happy, for a slave would still be a slave." Slavery must be a violation of all justice, and whatever benefit might be derived from that trade, to an individual, was derived from dishonour and dishonesty. He forced from the unhappy victim that which he did not choose to give—his liberty; and he gave to him that which he in vain attempted to show was an equivalent to the thing he took, it being a thing for which there was no equivalent, and which, if he had not obtained by force, he would never have possessed at all. Nor can the injustice and injury be disproved, unless it can first be proved that it had pleased God to give to the inhabitants of Britain a property in the lives and liberty of the natives of Africa. How must the bosom of a negro swell at the insulting, disparaging comparison, between the land of his savage liberty, and that of his civilized bondage! Happier in Jamaica than in his own native wilds in Africa! Why, then, if under extraordinary circumstances he had obtained the means, did he willingly part with his last shilling to purchase his release from this situation of superior happiness? Why was it universally reckoned the highest reward that a master could bestow upon his slave, for long and faithful services, to give him his freedom? If the liberated slave did not always return to his own country, sufficient reason might be assigned in the probability that those he loved were dead; and the possibility that he might again be kidnapped, and hurried to a slave ship: yet his love of country was beyond a doubt. The negroes were often heard to talk of it in terms of the strongest affection, and acts of suicide were frequent, under the notion that these afforded them the readiest means of getting home. Hence, though funerals in Africa are accompanied with lamentations and cries of sorrow, they were attended in the West Indies with every demonstration of joy. To complete the climax of degradation and insult, it has been gravely declared that the negro is not man, that he belongs to an inferior race, nearer akin to the ourang-outang than to the human species: or at least, that he is utterly and incorrigibly embruted and immoral, incapable of having his mind enlightened by instruction, or his conduct regulated by principle. Hence, the means of instruction have been withheld, and all discipline and culture referred to the whip and the handcuff. On this plea of inferiority it is easy to argue, but not to prove, that the black has not equal rights, and is not entitled to the same usage as white men; that, while it would be unlawful to detain white men in slavery, it is right to enslave blacks. "The retreating forehead and depressed vertex, indicate mental inferiority," say these haughty insulters of the negro; but do they prove that he has not an immortal soul, is not an accountable creature, is not capable of every thing, rational and spiritual, essential to a man and a christian, is not as nearly related to "Our Father which is in heaven," as the fairest complexioned and most lofty-browed European? Beside, we have abundant proofs that negroes placed under equal cultivation, discover intelligence, genius, and industry, not at all inferior to those of white men. We have proofs also, that white men subjected to the same process of slavery, soon manifest the same result of mental and moral degradation. It has been justly observed, by an intelligent modern traveller, "Cut off hope for the future, and freedom from the present; superadd a due pressure of bodily suffering and personal degradation, and you have a slave, who, of whatever zone, nation, or complexion, will be what the poor African is, torpid, debased, and lowered beneath the standard of humanity." An eye-witness thus describes the effects of slavery among the Arabs on Europeans:— "If they have been any considerable time in slavery, they appear lost to reason and feeling, their spirits broken, and their faculties sunk in a species of stupor, which I am unable adequately to describe; they appear degraded even below the negro slave. The succession of hardships, without any protecting law to which they can appeal for alleviation or redress, seems to destroy every spring of exertion or hope in their minds; they appear indifferent to every thing around them—abject, servile, brutish." On the other hand, "Loosen the shackles of the slaves, let them feel the invigorating influence of freedom, let hope enter their bosoms, and let the prospect of reward cheer them; let them walk erect like men, and they will soon refute the foul calumny of their great and inevitable inferiority, to those who have a white skin." This experiment will now, happily, be tried; but in the reign of slavery it might justly be said, "a dreadful and debasing consistency runs through the whole of their treatment; they are bought, and sold, and bred, and worked, and flogged, and branded, like brute animals. If any thing is construed into insurrection, they are shot at like wild beasts; if, having escaped, they make the least resistance, they may be cut down; and, if taken alive, are compelled to work in chains, or are placed by night in the stocks, or have a large iron collar fastened on their necks, like beasts which are accustomed to break through an enclosure, or to stray beyond their limits;" and, as far as the thorough going advocate of slavery is concerned, not an effort shall be made to impart to so degraded a thing, one ray of intellectual light, much less one anticipation of immortality; and those who attempted by any moral means to raise the slave in the scale of society, drew upon themselves the hatred and vengeance of his oppressors and maligners. Persecution for religion, or the attempt to impart religious instruction to negroes, |