historian, "were
probably some of the chief sources of supplying the Roman market with
British slaves--prisoners taken in war were added to the number--there
might be also among them some unfortunate gamesters, who, after having lost
all their 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 have 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
series of years, by a progression slow, and for a time almost
imperceptible, we had become rich in a variety of acquirements. We were
favoured above measure in the gifts of Providence, we were unrivalled 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
the 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 a