ons,
which may be considered as a concert composed only of principal parts, _con
corni ad libertum_.'

Upon reading this passage attentively, I was surprised to find it contain a
singular mixture of contradictory principles, and in the same breath, the
sentiments of a philosopher and of a colonist; of an advocate for the
Negroes, and of their enemy.

It is evident that as a philosopher, and a friend to humanity, you are
inclined to alleviate the lot of the Negroes, and commend those who do so,
but this tenderness itself conceals a subtile venom that ought to be
exposed. For you only bestow your pity upon the Negroes, while you owe
them, if you are a philosopher, vindication and defense; you wish their
masters to be humane; they ought to be just. Instead of praising such
humanity, you ought to have blamed them for stopping there, in short, such
a contempt for the Negroes pervades this whole article, as will necessarily
encourage their tormentors to rivet their chains. Is not this contempt
observable, for instance in the very first period?

"Below this class of inhabitants (the meanest whites of Virginia) we must
rank the Negroes, who would be still more to be pitied, if their natural
insensibility did not in some measure alleviate the wretchedness
inseparable from slavery."

And who told you, Sir, that nature had created the Negroes with less
feeling than other men? do you judge so because they have vegetated for
three centuries in European fetters, and at this day have not altogether
shaken off the horrid yoke? But do not their frequent risings, and the
cruelties they from time to time retaliate upon their masters, give the lie
to this natural insensibility? for an insensible being has no resentment.
If he does not feel, how should he remember? Do you think the wretched
Indians, who, since the discovery of the New world, are burried in the
mines of Peru, are also naturally insensible, because they suffer
patiently?

You calumniate nature in making her grant favours to particulars; in giving
her a system of inequality among her offspring. All men are cast in the
same mould.--The varieties which distinguish individuals, are the sports of
chance, or the result of different circumstances; but the black comes into
the world with as much sensibility as the white, the Peruvian, as the
European.

What then degrades this natural and moral sensibility? The greater or less
privation of liberty; in proportion as man loses it