Page:The American Slave Trade (Spears).djvu/16

 pirates who have made passengers and sailors walk the plank, and the religious zealots who have burned their opponents at the stake, were more merciful than the slave-traders.

Further than that, no trade ever paid such large returns on the investments. More remarkable still, the trade at one time made some who followed it heroes, but at last degraded all who were connected with it beyond the power of words to describe.

But now that I have written out the facts, I am bound to say, here in advance, and to repeat further on, that the intrinsic evil in the slave-trade was not found in the slaughter of the helpless during the raids in Africa, or the horrors of the middle passage, or the brutality of planters who deliberately worked their slaves to death as a matter of business policy; nor was it in all of these combined. I cannot say all that is in my thought, but it is a fact that the slave trade and the plantations might have been carried on profitably without any cruelty whatever to the slave. It is a matter of knowledge among people now living that many planters promoted the physical comforts and added to the mental pleasures of their slaves, while here and there a ship was found to make the middle passage without losing a life. The horrors of the trade that cried aloud to heaven for more than three hundred years were merely the grosser natural outgrowths of the root evil in it.

Nor is that all. If we look at the story with judicial mind (and it is necessary, though difficult, to do so) we shall find that the ills brought upon the