Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/98

 This is no digression. He who has taken the pains to read the preceding paragraph, will be able to understand, how it happened, that even with such a master as major Thornton, I was neither happy nor content.

It is true I was well fed, well clothed, and not severely worked; and in these particulars, — as my master was fond of boasting, and as I have since found to be the case, — my situation was far superior to that of very many freemen. But I lacked one thing which every freeman has; and that one want was enough to make me miserable. I wanted liberty; the liberty of laboring for myself, not for a master; of pursuing my own happiness, instead of toiling at his pleasure, and for his gain. This liberty can lighten the hardest lot. He knows but little of human nature, who has not discovered, that to all who rise one step above the brutes, it is far pleasanter to starve and freeze after their own fashion, than to be fed and clothed and worked upon compulsion.

I was wretched, — for I had no object of hope or rational desire. I was a slave; and the laws held out no prospect of emancipation. All the efforts in the world could not better my condition; all the efforts in the world could not prevent me from falling — perhaps tomorrow — into the hands of another master, as cruel and unreasonable as evil passions and hard-heartedness could make him. The future offered only the chance of evils. I might starve with cold and hunger as well as another; I might perish by gun-shot wounds, or the torture of the lash; or be hung up, perhaps, without judge or jury. But of bettering my condition, I had neither chance, nor hopes. I was a prisoner for life; at the present moment, not suffering for food or clothing, but without the slightest prospect of liberation; and likely enough at any moment, to change my keeper, and under the discipline of a new jailer, to feel the pinchings of cold and hunger, and to tremble daily beneath the whip. I was cut off and excluded from all those hopes and wishes, which are the chief impulses of human action. I could not aim to become the master of a little cottage, which, however humble, I might call my own; to be the lord of one poor acre, which however small or barren, might still be mine