Page:The American Slave Trade (Spears).djvu/133

 But with this admission it must be declared that every such tax was laid either through greed (i.e., for the sake of giving the State a share of the profits) or through the idea that from a business point of view white servants would develop the country more rapidly; or through a mean and degrading fear of the blacks. Not one act passed by a colonial legislature showed any appreciation of the intrinsic evil in the trade or tended to extirpate it from the seas — not one. It might as well be asserted that our present tariff on imported woollen goods shows that we abhor shepherds and desire to extirpate the world's traffic in wool, as to assert that the colonial tariffs on the slavetrade were honest efforts to rid the world of a horrid traffic. The world was not at that time sufficiently civilized to even discuss the rights of slaves. It was not until 1772 that Granville Sharp, the lone abolitionist of England, got one lone question regarding one right of one lone slave heard and decided in an English court. The assertion that the British forced the traffic on unwilling colonists in America is a puling whine.