or the sake of the profit of
the punishment, and who for the same reason, continue the use of barbarous
and absurd ordeals as a test of innocence or guilt?

In the second of these branches the counterpart of the evil is to be seen
in the conduct of those, who purchase the miserable natives in their own
country, and convey them to distant lands. And here questions, similar to
the former, may be asked. Do they experience no corruption of their nature,
or become chargeable with no violation of right, who, when they go with
their ships to this continent, know the enormities which their visits there
will occasion, who buy their fellow-creature man, and this, knowing the way
in which he comes into their hands, and who chain, and imprison, and
scourge him? Do the moral feelings of those persons escape without injury,
whose hearts are hardened? And can the hearts of those be otherwise than
hardened, who are familiar with the tears and groans of innocent strangers
forcibly torn away from every thing that is dear to them in life, who are
accustomed to see them on board their vessels in a state of suffocation and
in the agonies of despair, and who are themselves in the habits of the
cruel use of arbitrary power?

The counterpart of the evil in its third branch is to be seen in the
conduct of those, who, when these miserable people have been landed,
purchase and carry them to their respective homes. And let us see whether a
mass of wickedness is not generated also in the present case. Can those
have nothing to answer for, who separate the faithful ties which nature and
religion have created? Can their feelings be otherwise than corrupted, who
consider their fellow-creatures as brutes, or treat those as cattle, who
may become the temples of the Holy Spirit, and in whom the Divinity
disdains not himself to dwell? Is there no injustice in forcing men to
labour without wages? Is there no breach of duty, when we are commanded to
clothe the naked, and feed the hungry, and visit the sick and in prison, in
exposing them to want, in torturing them by cruel punishment, and in
grinding them down, by hard labour, so as to shorten their days? Is there
no crime in adopting a system, which keeps down all the noble faculties of
their souls, and which positively debases and corrupts their nature? Is
there no crime in perpetuating these evils among their innocent offspring?
And finally, besides all these crimes, is there not naturally in the
famili