Page:Benezet's A caution and warning to Great Britain and her colonies.pdf/7

[ 5 ] Trade, the plenty which Guinea affords its inhabitants, the barbarous treatment of the Negroes, and the observations made thereon by authors of note, that it is inconsistent with the plainest precepts of the gospel, the dictates of reason, and every common sentiment of humanity.

In an account of the European Setttlements in America, printed in London, 1757, the author speaking on this subject, says: "The Negroes in our Colonies endure a slavery more compleat and attended with far worse circumstances than what any people in their condition suffer in any other part of the world, or have suffered in any other period of time: proofs of this are not wanting, The prodigious waste which we experience in this unhappy part of our species, is a full and melancholy evidence of this truth. The Island of Barbados, (the Negroes upon which do not amount to eighty thousand) notwithstanding all the means which they use to encrease them by propagation, and that the climate is in every respect (except that of being more wholesome) exactly resembling the climate from whence they come; notwithstanding all this, Barbados lies under a necessity of an annual recruit of five thousand slaves, to keep up the stock at the number I have mentioned. This prodigious failure, which is at least in the same proportion in all our islands, shews demonstratively that some uncommon and unsupportable hardship lies upon the Negroes, which wears them down in such a surprising manner; and this, I imagine, is principally the excessive labour which they undergo.'"

In an account of part of North-America, published by Thomas Jeffery, printed 1761, speaking of the usage the Negroes receive in the West-India Islands, thus expresses