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78 Scattered the seeds of pestilence, and fed Unnatural vegetation, where the land Teemed with all earthquake, tempest, and disease, Was man a nobler being; slavery Had crushed him to his country's blood-stained dust; Or he was bartered for the fame of power, Which all internal impulses destroying, Makes human will an article of trade; Or he was changed with Christians for their gold, And dragged to distant isles, where to the sound Of the flesh-mangling scourge, he does the work Of all-polluting luxury and wealth, Which doubly visits on the tyrants' heads The long-protracted fulness of their woe; Or he was led to legal butchery, To turn to worms beneath that burning sun, Where kings first leagued against the rights of men, And priests first traded with the name of God.

Even where the milder zone afforded man A seeming shelter, yet contagion there, Blighting his being with unnumbered ills, Spread like a quenchless fire; nor truth till late Availed to arrest its progress, or create That peace which first in bloodless victory waved Her snowy standard o'er this favoured clime: There man was long the train-bearer of slaves, The mimic of surrounding misery, The jackall of ambition's lion-rage, The bloodhound of religion's hungry zeal.