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I come now to the evil, as it has been proved to arise in the third case;
or to consider the situation of the unhappy victims of the trade, when
their painful voyages are over, or after they have been landed upon their
destined shores. And here we are to view them first under the degrading
light of cattle. We are to see them examined, handled, selected, separated,
and sold. Alas! relatives are separated from relatives, as if, like cattle,
they had no rational intellect, no power of feeling the nearness of
relationship, nor sense of the duties belonging to the ties of life! We are
next to see them labouring, and this for the benefit of those, to whom they
are under no obligation, by any law either natural or divine, to obey. We
are to see them, if refusing the commands of their purchasers, however
weary, or feeble, or indisposed, subject to corporal punishments, and, if
forcibly resisting them, to death. We are to see them in a state of general
degradation and misery. The knowledge, which their oppressors have of their
own crime in having violated the rights of nature, and of the disposition
of the injured to seek all opportunities of revenge, produces a fear, which
dictates to them the necessity of a system of treatment by which they shall
keep up a wide distinction between the two, and by which the noble feelings
of the latter shall be kept down, and their spirits broken.
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