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. We
are to see them again subject to individual persecution, as anger, or
malice, or any bad passion may suggest: hence the whip, the chain, the
iron-collar! hence the various modes of private torture, of which so
many accounts have been truly given. Nor can such horrible cruelties be
discovered so as to be made punishable, while the testimony of any
number of the oppressed is invalid against the oppressors, however they
may be offences against the laws. And, lastly, we are to see their
innocent offspring, against whose personal liberty the shadow of an
argument cannot be advanced, inheriting all the miseries of their
parents' lot.

The evil then, as far as it has been hitherto viewed, presents to us, in
its three several departments, a measure of human suffering not to be
equalled--not to be calculated--not to be described. But would that we
could consider this part of the subject as dismissed! would that in each
of the departments now examined there was no counterpart left us to
contemplate! But this cannot be; for if there be persons who suffer
unjustly there must be others who oppress: and if there be those who
oppress, there must be to the suffering, which has been occasioned, a
corresponding portion of immorality or guilt.

We are obliged then to view the counterpart of the evil in question,
before we can make a proper estimate of the nature of it. And, in
examining this part of it, we shall find that we have a no less
frightful picture to behold than in the former cases; or that, while the
miseries endured by the unfortunate Africans excite our pity on the one
hand, the vices, which are connected with them, provoke our indignation
and abhorrence on the other. The Slave Trade, in this point of view,
must strike us as an immense mass of evil on account of the criminality
attached to it, as displayed in