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