Page:An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans.djvu/88

74 you trust the very best man you know, with your time, your interests, your family, and your life, unless the contract were guarded on every side by the strong arm of the law? If a money-loving neighbor could force you to toil, and could gain a certain number of dollars for every hour of your labor, how much rest should you expect to have?

It is utter nonsense to say that generosity of disposition is a protection against tyranny, where all the power is on one side. It may be, and it no doubt is so, in particular instances; but they must be exceptions to the general rule.

We all know that the Southerners have a high sense of what the world calls honor, and that they are brave, hospitable, and generous to people of their own color; but the more we respect their virtues, the more cause is there to lament the demoralizing system, which produces such unhappy effects on all who come within its baneful influence. Most of them may be as kind as can be expected of human nature, endowed with almost unlimited power to do wrong; and some of them may be even more benevolent than the warmest friend of the negro would dare to hope; but while we admit all this, we must not forget that there is in every community a class of men, who will not be any better than the laws compel them to be.

Captain Riley, in his Narrative, says: "Strange as it may seem to the philanthropist, my free and proud spirited countrymen still hold a million and a half of human beings in the most cruel bonds of slavery; who are kept at hard labor, and smarting under the lash of inhuman, mercenary drivers; in many instances enduring the miseries of hunger, thirst, imprisonment, cold, nakedness, and even tortures. This is no picture of the imagination. For the honor of human nature, I wish likenesses were nowhere to be found! I myself have witnessed such scenes in different parts of my own country; and the bare recollection of them now chills my blood with horror."