hich the shelter of his
master's roof affords.

The negro has no family; woman is merely the temporary companion of his
pleasures, and his children are upon an equality with himself from
the moment of their birth. Am I to call it a proof of God's mercy or
a visitation of his wrath, that man in certain states appears to be
insensible to his extreme wretchedness, and almost affects, with a
depraved taste, the cause of his misfortunes? The negro, who is plunged
in this abyss of evils, scarcely feels his own calamitous situation.
Violence made him a slave, and the habit of servitude gives him the
thoughts and desires of a slave; he admires his tyrants more than he
hates them, and finds his joy and his pride in the servile imitation of
those who oppress him: his understanding is degraded to the level of his
soul.

The negro enters upon slavery as soon as he is born: nay, he may have
been purchased in the womb, and have begun his slavery before he began
his existence. Equally devoid of wants and of enjoyment, and useless to
himself, he learns, with his first notions of existence, that he is the
property of another, who has an interest in preserving his life, and
that the care of it does not devolve upon himself; even the power of
thought appears to him a useless gift of Providence, and he quietly
enjoys the privileges of his debasement. If he becomes free,
independence is often felt by him to be a heavier burden than slavery;
for having learned, in the course of his life, to submit to everything
except reason, he is too much unacquainted with her dictates to obey
them. A thousand new desires beset him, and he is destitute of the
knowledge and energy necessary to resist them: these are masters which
it is necessary to contend with, and he has learnt only to submit and
obey. In short, he sinks to such a depth of wretchedness, that while
servitude brutalizes, liberty destroys him.

Oppression has been no less fatal to the Indian than to the negro race,
but its effects are different. Before the arrival of white men in the
New World, the inhabitants of North America lived quietly in their
woods, enduring the vicissitudes and practising the virtues and vices
common to savage nations. The Europeans, having dispersed the Indian
tribes and driven them into the deserts, condemned them to a wandering
life full of inexpressible sufferings.

Savage nations are only controlled by opinion and by custom. When the
North American Indians