n who
professed to know all about the subject and to be authorities upon it
that any such cruelties were practised on a well-regulated plantation
belonging to a {191} civilized owner. It was constantly argued, with
self-complacency, that the planter's own interests would not allow him
thus to mar the efficiency of the human animals who had to do his work,
and that even if the planter had no pity for them, he was sure to have
a wholesome and restraining consideration for the physical value of his
own living property.

[Sidenote: 1832--The horrors of the slave trade]

Zachary Macaulay and the Buxtons, the Wilberforces and the Whitbreads,
were able to give innumerable and overwhelming proofs that the system
every day was working such evils as any system might be expected to
work which left one set of human beings absolutely at the mercy of
another set of human beings. Many years after this great controversy
had won its complete success for the English colonies, a chief justice
of the Supreme Court of the United States laid it down as law that a
slave had no rights which his owner was bound to respect. Up to the
time of which we are now writing, it was certainly assumed, in our West
Indian colonies, as a self-evident doctrine, utterly beyond dispute or
question, that a slave had no rights which his owner was bound to
respect. The band of resolute philanthropists who had taken up the
subject in England were able to show that frequent flogging of men and
women was a regular part of the day's incidents of every plantation,
and that branding was constantly used, not merely as a means of
punishment, but also as a means of identification. It was a common
practice when a female slave attempted to escape for her owner to have
her branded on the breast with red-hot iron as an easy means of proving
her identity if she were to succeed for a time in getting out of his
reach. Numbers of advertisements were produced in which the owners,
seeking through the newspapers for the recovery of some of their women
slaves, proclaimed the important fact that the fugitive women were
branded on both breasts, and that thus there could be no difficulty
about their identification. We need not go further into the details of
the subject, but it may be as well to mention that we have not touched
at all upon the most revolting evidences of the horrors which seemed to
{192} be the inevitable accompaniment of the slave system. Brougham
was one of t