to war; you foment their quarrels; you supply
them with arms and ammunition, and all--from the _motives of
benevolence_. Does a man set fire to an house, for the purpose of
rescuing the inhabitants from the flames? But if they are only
purchased, to _deliver them from death_; why, when they are
delivered into your hands, as protectors, do you torture them with
hunger? Why do you kill them with fatigue? Why does the whip deform
their bodies, or the knife their limbs? Why do you sentence them to
death? to a death, infinitely more excruciating than that from which you
so kindly saved them? What answer do you make to this? for if you had
not humanely preserved them from the hands of their conquerors, a quick
death perhaps, and that in the space of a moment, had freed them from
their pain: but on account of your _favour_ and _benevolence_,
it is known, that they have lingered years in pain and agony, and have
been sentenced, at last, to a dreadful death for the most insignificant
offence.

Neither can we allow the other argument to be true, on which you found
your merit; "that you take them from their country for their own
convenience; because Africa, scorched with incessant heat, and subject
to the most violent rains and tempests, is unwholesome, and unfit to be
inhabited." Preposterous men! do you thus judge from your own feelings?
Do you thus judge from your own constitution and frame? But if you
suppose that the Africans are incapable of enduring their own climate,
because you cannot endure it yourselves; why do you receive them into
slavery? Why do you not measure them here by the same standard? For if
you are unable to bear hunger and thirst, chains and imprisonment,
wounds and torture, why do you not suppose them incapable of enduring
the same treatment? Thus then is your argument turned against
yourselves. But consider the answer which the Scythians gave the
AEgyptians, when they contended about the antiquity of their
original[054], "That nature, when she first distinguished countries by
different degrees of heat and cold, tempered the bodies of animals, at
the same instant, to endure the different situations: that as the
climate of Scythia was severer than that of AEgypt, so were the bodies of
the Scythians harder, and as capable of enduring the severity of their
atmosphere, as the AEgyptians the temperateness of their own."

But you may say perhaps, that, though they are capable of enduring their
own climate, yet