Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/254

 Every where I have seen the hateful empire of aristocratic usurpation, lording it with a high hand, over the lives, the liberty, and the happiness of men. But every where, or almost every where, I have seen the bondsmen beginning to forget the base lore of traditionary subserviency, and already feeling the impulses, and lisping in the language of freedom. I have seen it every where; — every where, except in my native America.

There are slaves in many other countries; but no where else is oppression so heartless and unrelenting. No where else, has tyranny ever assumed a shape so fiendish. No where else is it, of all the world beside, the open aim of the laws, and the professed purpose of the masters, to blot out the intellects of half the population, and to extinguish at once and forever, both the capacity and the hope of freedom.

In catholic Brazil, — in the Spanish islands, where one might expect to find tyranny aggravated by ignorance and superstition, the slave is still regarded as a man, and as entitled to something of human sympathies. He may kneel at the altar by his master's side; and he may hear the catholic priest proclaiming boldly from his pulpit, the sacred truth that all men are equal. He may find consolation and support in the hope of one day becoming a freeman. He may purchase his liberty with money; if barbarously and unreasonably punished, he may demand it as his legal right; he may expect it from the gratitude or the generosity of his master; or from the conscience-stricken dictates of his priest-attended deathbed. When he becomes a freeman, he has a freeman's rights, and enjoys a real and practical equality, at the mere mention of which, the prating and prejudiced Americans are filled with creeping horror, and passionate indignation,

Slavery, in those countries, by the force of causes now in operation, is fast approaching to its end; and let the African slave-trade be once totally abolished, and before the expiration of half a century, there will not a slave be found in either Spanish or Portuguese America.

It is in the United States alone, that country so apt to claim a monopoly of freedom, that the spirit of tyranny still