make the above charge know better. Their own
writings furnish the most incontestable proof that they know better. A
writer in the Edinburgh Review,[207] for example, has not only asserted
that "slavery degrades its subjects into brutes," but he has the
audacity to declare, in regard to slavery in the United States, that "we
do not believe that such oppression is to be found in any other part of
the world, civilized or uncivilized. We do not believe that such
oppression ever existed before." Yet even this unprincipled writer has,
in the very article containing this declaration, shown that he knows
better. He has shown that he knows that the African has been elevated
and improved by his servitude in the United States. We shall proceed to
convict him out of his own mouth.

"The African slave-trade was frightful," says he; "but its prey were
savages, accustomed to suffering and misery, and to endure them with
patience almost amounting to apathy. The victims of the American
slave-trade have been bred in a highly-cultivated community. Their
dispositions have been softened, their intellects sharpened, and their
sensibilities excited, by society, by Christianity, and by all the
ameliorating but enervating influences of civilization. The savage
submits to be enslaved himself, or have his wife or his child carried
off by his enemies, as merely a calamity. His misery is not embittered
by indignation. He suffers only what--if he could--he would inflict. He
cannot imagine a state of society in which there shall not be masters
and slaves, kidnapping and man-selling, coffles and slave-traders, or in
which any class shall be exempt from misfortunes which appear to him to
be incidental to humanity."

Thus, according to this very sagacious, honest, consistent writer, it
matters little what you do with the native African: he has no moral
sense; he feels no wrong; he suffers only what he would inflict. But
when you come to deal with the American slave, or, as this writer calls
him, "the civilized Virginian," it is quite another thing! His
dispositions have been softened, his intellect sharpened, and his
sensibilities roused to a new life, by society and by Christianity! And
yet, according to this very writer, this highly civilized Virginian is
the man who, by American slavery, has been degraded from the native
African into a brute! We dismiss his lawless savage, and his equally
lawless pen, from our further consideration.

We proceed, i