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countries who have united with her in the hopeless task of suppressing the slave-trade! But for that, these negroes might have been comfortably stowed in three or four ships, instead of being packed like herrings in a barrel in the hold of one only, and then all this loss of life and money might have been avoided. By this infernal mishap I am a loser to the extent of over thirty thousand dollars, and all for what? Why, simply because you British, with your sickly sentimentality, choose to regard the blacks as human beings like yourselves. You are all virtuous indignation because forsooth we slave-traders have bethought ourselves of the plan of removing them from their own country, where their lives would have been passed in a condition of the lowest and most degrading barbarism, and transporting them to another where they can be rendered useful and valuable; where, in return for their labour, they are fed, clothed, tended in sickness, and provided with comfortable homes; where their lives may be passed in peace and comfort and perfect freedom from all care; and where, if indeed they _are_ human, like ourselves, which I very much doubt, they may be converted to Christianity. You violently object to this amelioration of the lot of the negro savage; but you shut your eyes to the fact that thousands of your own countrymen and women are actually slaves of the most abject type, made so by your own insatiable and contemptible craving for _cheap_ clothing, _cheap_ food, cheap every thing, to satisfy which, and to, at the same time, gratify his own perfectly legitimate desire to make a living, the employer of labour has to grind his employes down in the matter of wage until their lives are a living lingering death to them, in comparison with which the future of those blacks down below will be a paradise. Bah! such hypocrisy sickens me. And yet, in support of this disgusting Pharisaism, you, and hundreds more like you, claiming to be intelligent beings, willingly endure hardships and face the perils of sickness, shipwreck, shot and steel with a persistent heroism that almost compels one's admiration, despite the mistaken enthusiasm which is its animating cause. Nay, do not speak, senor; I know exactly what you would say; I have heard, until I have become sick of it, the canting jargon of those meddlesome busy-bodies who, knowing nothing of the actual facts of slavery, or for their own purposes, hunt out exceptional cases o
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