e 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 familiar sight of the exercise, but more
especially in the exercise itself, of uncontrolled power, that which
vitiates the internal man? In seeing misery stalk daily over the land,
do not all become insensibly hardened? By giving birth to that misery
themselves, do they not become abandoned? In what state of society are
the corrupt appetites so easily, so quickly, and so frequently indulged,
and where else, by means of frequent indulgence, do these experience
such a monstrous growth? Where else is the temper subject to such
frequent irritation, or passion to such little control? Yes--if the
unhappy slave is in an unfortunate situation, so is the tyrant who holds
him. Action and reaction are equal to each other, as well in the moral
as in the natural world. You cannot exercise an improper dominion over a
fellow-creature, but by a wise ordering of Providence you must
necessarily injure yourself.

Having now considered the nature of the evil of the Slave Trade in its
three separate departments of suffering, and in its corresponding
counterparts of guilt, I shall make a few observations on the extent of
it.

On this subject it must strike us, that the misery and the crimes
included in the evil, as it has been found in Africa, were not like
common maladies, which make a short or periodical visit and then are
gone, but that they were continued daily. Nor were they like diseases,
which from local causes attack a village or a town, and by the skill of
the physician, under the blessing of Providence, are removed; but they
affected a whole c