the suffocating holds of their prisons,
like animals inclosed in an exhausted receiver? How shall I describe their
feelings, as exposed to all the personal indignities, which lawless
appetite or brutal passion may suggest? How shall I exhibit their
sufferings as determining to refuse sustenance and die, or as resolving to
break their chains, and, disdaining to live as slaves, to punish their
oppressors? How shall I give an idea of their agony, when under various
punishments and tortures for their reputed crimes? Indeed every part of
this subject defies my powers, and I must therefore satisfy myself and the
reader with a general representation, or in the words of a celebrated
member of Parliament, that "Never was so much human suffering condensed in
so small a space."

I come now to the evil, as it has been proved to arise in the third case;
or to consider the situation of the unhappy victims of the trade, when
their painful voyages are over, or after they have been landed upon their
destined shores. And here we are to view them first under the degrading
light of cattle. We are to see them examined, handled, selected, separated,
and sold. Alas! relatives are separated from relatives, as if, like cattle,
they had no rational intellect, no power of feeling the nearness of
relationship, nor sense of the duties belonging to the ties of life! We are
next to see them labouring, and this for the benefit of those, to whom they
are under no obligation, by any law either natural or divine, to obey. We
are to see them, if refusing the commands of their purchasers, however
weary, or feeble, or indisposed, subject to corporal punishments, and, if
forcibly resisting them, to death. We are to see them in a state of general
degradation and misery. The knowledge, which their oppressors have of their
own crime in having violated the rights of nature, and of the disposition
of the injured to seek all opportunities of revenge, produces a fear, which
dictates to them the necessity of a system of treatment by which they shall
keep up a wide distinction between the two, and by which the noble feelings
of the latter shall be kept down, and their spirits broken. We are to see
them again subject to individual persecution, as anger, or malice, or any
bad passion may suggest. Hence the whip--the chain--the iron-collar. Hence
the various modes of private torture, of which so many accounts have been
truly given. Nor can such horrible cruelties be disc