l
powers are, perhaps, never found among them, and that in general their
capacity is very limited, and their feelings animal and coarse--fitting
them peculiarly to discharge the lower, and merely mechanical offices of
society.

And why should it not be so? We have among domestic animals infinite
varieties, distinguished by various degrees of sagacity, courage,
strength, swiftness, and other qualities. And it may be observed, that
this is no objection to their being derived from a common origin, which
we suppose them to have had. Yet these accidental qualities, as they may
be termed, however acquired in the first instance, we know that they
transmit unimpaired to their posterity for an indefinite succession of
generations. It is most important that these varieties should be
preserved, and that each should be applied to the purposes for which it
is best adapted. No philo-zoost, I believe, has suggested it as
desirable that these varieties should be melted down into one equal,
undistinguished race of curs or road horses.

Slavery, as it is said in an eloquent article published in a Southern
periodical work,[242] to which I am indebted for other ideas, "has done
more to elevate a degraded race in the scale of humanity; to tame the
savage; to civilize the barbarous; to soften the ferocious; to enlighten
the ignorant, and to spread the blessings of Christianity among the
heathen, than all the missionaries that philanthropy and religion have
ever sent forth."[243] Yet unquestionable as this is, and though human
ingenuity and thought may be tasked in vain to devise any other means by
which these blessings could have been conferred, yet a sort of
sensibility which would be only mawkish and contemptible, if it were not
mischievous, affects still to weep over the wrongs of "injured Africa."
Can there be a doubt of the immense benefit which has been conferred on
the race, by transplanting them from their native, dark, and barbarous
regions, to the American continent and islands? There, three-fourths of
the race are in a state of the most deplorable personal slavery. And
those who are not, are in a scarcely less deplorable condition of
political slavery, to barbarous chiefs--who value neither life nor any
other human right, or enthralled by priests to the most abject and
atrocious superstitions. Take the following testimony of one of the few
disinterested observers, who has had an opportunity of observing them in
both situations.[