Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/130

 favorite phrase, God has appointed them the natural protectors; and in so doing, by their own confession, they voluntarily and knowingly expose those slaves, to the danger of eternal punishment! To this awful danger, they voluntarily and knowingly expose them, lest, should they lea to read, they might learn at the same time, their own rights, and the means of enforcing them.

What outrage upon humanity was ever equal to this? Other tyrannies have proceeded all lengths against man's temporal happiness; and in support of their evil dominion, have hazarded every extreme of temporary cruelty; but what other tyrants are recorded in all the world's history, who have openly and publicly confessed, that they prefer to expose their victims to the imminent danger of eternal misery, rather than impart a degree of instruction, which might, by possibility, endanger their own unjust and usurped authority? Can any one calmly consider the cool diabolism of this avowal, and believe it is men who make it? Men too, who seem in other matters, not destitute of the common feelings of good will; men who talk about liberty, virtue, and religion, and who speak ever of justice and humanity!

Were I inclined to superstition, I should believe they were not men, but rather demons incarnate; evil spirits who had assumed the human shape, and who falsely put on a semblance of human feelings, in order the more secretly and securely to prosecute their grand conspiracy against mankind. I should believe so, did I not know that the love of social superiority, that very impulse of the human heart, which is the main-spring of civilization and the chief source of all human improvement, is able, when suffered to work on, uncontrolled by other more generous emotions, to corrupt man's whole nature, and to drive him to acts the most horrid and detestable. When to the corruptest form of this fierce passion, is joined a base fear, at once cowardly and cruel, what wonder that man becomes a creature to be scorned and hated? — To be pitied rather; the maniac can hardly be held accountable for the enormities to which his madness prompts him, even though that madness be self-created.

However diabolical the tyranny may be esteemed, which