Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/253

 goods, at length staked themselves, their wives, and their children." Now every one of these sources of slavery had been stated to be at this hour a source of slavery in Africa. If these practices, therefore, were to be admitted as proofs of the natural incapacity of its inhabitants, why might they not bare been applied to ancient Britain? Why might not then some Roman senator, pointing to British barbarians, have predicted with equal boldness, that these were a people who were destined never to be free; who were without the understanding necessary for the attainment of useful arts; depressed by the hand of nature below the level of the human species, and created to form a supply of slaves for the rest of the world? But happily, since that time, notwithstanding what would then have been the justness of these predictions, we had emerged from barbarism. We were now raised to a situation which exhibited a striking contrast to every circumstance by which a Roman might have characterized us, and by which we now characterized Africa. There was, indeed, one thing wanting to complete the contrast, and to clear us altogether from the imputation of acting even to this hour as barbarians; for we continued to this hour a barbarous traffic in slaves. We continued it even yet, in spite of all our great pretensions. We were once as obscure among the nations of the earth, as savage in our manners, as debased in our morals, as degraded in our understandings as these unhappy Africans. But in the lapse of a long scries of years, by a progression slow, and for a time almost imperceptible, we had become rich in a variety of acquirements. We were favored above measure in the gifts of Providence, we were unrivaled in commerce, preeminent in arts, foremost in the pursuits of philosophy and science, and established in all the blessings of civil society; we were in thft possession of peace, of liberty, and of happiness; we were under the guidance of a mild and a beneficent religion; and we were protected by impartial laws, and the purest administration of justice; we were living under a system of government, which our own happy experience led us to pronounce the best and wisest, and which had become the admiration of the world. From all these blessings we must forever have been excluded had there been any truth in those principles which some had not hesitated to lay down as applicable to the case of Africa; and we should have been, at this moment, little superior, either in morals, knowledge, or refinement, to the rude inhabitants of that continent.

If, then, we felt that this perpetual confinement in the fetters of brutal ignorance would have been the greatest calamity which could have befallen us; if we viewed with gratitude the contrast between our present and our former situation; if we shuddered to think of the misery which would still have overwhelmed us, had our country continued to the present times, through some cruel policy, to be the mart for slaves to the more civilized nations of the world; God forbid that we should any longer subject Africa to the same dreadful scourge, and exclude that light of knowledge from her coasts which had reached every other quarter of the globe!

He trusted we should no longer continue this commerce; and that we should no longer consider ourselves as conferring too great a boon on the natives of