ffects on Africans as Prichard
describes them to have had on certain of the Irish who were
driven, some generations back, to the hills in Ulster and
Connaught; and these depressing influences have had such
moral and physical effects on some tribes, that ages
probably will be required to undo what ages have done. This
degradation, however, would hardly be given as a reason for
holding any race in bondage, unless the advocate had sunk
morally to the same low state. Apart from the frightful loss
of life in the process by which, it is pretended, the
Negroes are better provided for than in a state of liberty
in their own country, it is this very system that
perpetuates, if not causes, the unhappy condition with which
the comparative comfort of some of them in slavery is
contrasted.

"Ethnologists reckon the African as by no means the lowest
of the human family. He is nearly as strong physically as
the European; and, as a race, is wonderfully persistent
among the nations of the earth. Neither the diseases nor the
ardent spirits which proved so fatal to North-American
Indians, South-Sea Islanders, and Australians, seem capable
of annihilating the Negroes. Even when subjected to that
system so destructive to human life, by which they are torn
from their native soil, they spring up irrepressibly, and
darken half the new continent. They are gifted by nature
with physical strength capable of withstanding the sorest
privations, and a lightheartedness which, as a sort of
compensation, enables them to make the best of the worst
situations. It is like that power which the human frame
possesses of withstanding heat, and to an extent which we
should never have known, had not an adventurous surgeon gone
into an oven, and burnt his fingers with his own watch. The
Africans have wonderfully borne up under unnatural
conditions that would have proved fatal to most races.

"It is remarkable that the power of resistance under
calamity, or, as some would say, adaptation for a life of
servitude, is peculiar only to certain tribes on the
continent of Africa. Climate cannot be made to account for
the fact that many would pine in a state of slavery, or
voluntarily perish. No Krooman can be converted into a
slave, and yet he is an inhabitant of the