82

MONTESQUIEU-J. J. ROUSSEAU-BUFFON.

MONTESQUIEU.

Slavery is not useful either to the master or to the slave; to the slave, because he can do nothing by virtue; to the master, because he contracts with his slaves all sorts of evil habits, inures himself insensibly to neglect every moral virtue, and becomes proud, passionate, hard-hearted, violent, voluptuous, and cruel. The slave sees a society happy whereof he is not even a part; he finds that security is established for others, but not for him: he perceives that his master has a soul capable of self-advancement, while his own is violently and for ever repressed. Nothing puts one nearer the condition of the beasts than always to see freemen and not to be free. Such a person is the natural enemy of the society in which he lives.

It is impossible to allow the negroes are men, because if we allow them to be men, it will begin to be believed that we are not Christians.

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU.

To renounce our liberty is to renounce our quality of man, and with it all the rights and duties of humanity; and no adequate compensation can possibly be made for such a sacrifice; as it is in itself imcompati ble with the nature of man, whose actions, when once he is deprived of his free will, must be destitute of all morality. In a word, a convention which stipulates for absolute authority on one side, and unlimited obedience on the other, must always be considered as vain and contradictory. What right can my slave have that is not mine, since every thing that he has belongs to me; and to speak of the right of me against myself is absolute nonsense.

Thus in whatever light we view things, the right of slavery is found to be null; not only because it is illegal, but because it can have no existence; for the terms slavery and right contradict and exclude each other; and be it from man to man, or from a man to a nation, it would be equally nonsensical to say-I make a covenant with you entirely at your expense, and for my benefit; I will observe it as far as my inclination leads me, and you shall observe it as far as I please.-[On the Social Contract.]

BUFFON.

Upon the whole, it is apparent that the unfortunate negroes are endowed with excellent hearts, and possess the seeds of every human virtue. I cannot write their history, without lamenting their miserable condition. Is it not more than enough to reduce men to slavery, and to oblige them to labor perpetually, without the capacity of acquiring property? To these, is it necessary to add cruelty, and blows, and to abuse them worse than brutes? Humanity revolts against those odious oppressions which result from avarice, and which would have been daily renewed, had not the laws given a friendly check to the brutality of masters, and fixed limits to the sufferings of their slaves. They are forced to labor; and yet the coarsest food is dealt out to them with a sparing hand. "They support," say their obdurate taskmasters, 66 hunger without inconvenience; a single

European meal is sufficient provision to a negro for three days; however little they eat or sleep they are always equally strong and equally fit for labor." How can men, in whose breasts a single spark of humanity remains unextinguished, adopt suc detestable maxims? How dare they by such barbarous and diabolical arguments, attempt to paliate those oppressions which originate solely from their thirst of gold? But let us abandon those hardened monsters to perpetual infamy and return to our subject.-Natural History.

H. GREGOIRE.

If, says Price, you have a right to make another man a slave, he has a right to make you a slave; and if we have no right says Ramsay, to sell him, no one has a right to purchase him.

If ever negroes, bursting their chains, should come (which Heaven forbid) on the European coast, to drag whites of both sexes from their families; to chain them and conduct them to Africa, and mark them with a hot iron; if whites stolen, sold, purchased by crimes, and placed under the guidance of merciless inspectors, were immediately compelled by the stroke of the whip, to work in a climate injurious to their health, where, at the close of each day, they could have no other consolation than that of advancing another step to the tomb--no other perspective than to suffer and to die in all the anguish of despair-if devoted to misery and ignominy, they were excluded from all the privileges of society, and declared legally incapable of judicial action, their testimony would not have been admitted even against the black class; if driven from the sidewalks, they were compelled to mingle with the animals in the middle of the street-if a subscription were made to have them lashed in a mass, and their backs, to prevent gangrene, covered with pepper and with salt-if the forfeit for killing them were but a trifling sum-if a reward were offered for apprehending those who escape from slavery-if those who escape were hunted by a pack of hounds, trained to carnage-if, blaspheming the Divinity, the blacks pretended, that by their origin they had permission of Heaven to preach passive obedience and resignation to the whites—if greedy hireling writers published, that for this reason, just reprisals may be exercised against the rebellious whites, and that white slaves are happy, more happy than the peasants in the bosom of Africa ;--in a word, if all the arts of cunning and calumny, all the strength and fury of avarice, all the inventions of ferocity were directed against you, by a coalition of dogs, merchants, priests, kings, soldiers, and colonists, what cry of horror would resound through these countries? To express it, new epithets would be sought; a crowd of writers, and particularly of poets, would exhaust their eloquent lamentations, provided that having nothing to fear, there was something to gain. Europeans, reverse this hypothesis, and see what you are!

Yes, I repeat it, there is not a vice, not a species of wickedness, of which Europe is not guilty towards negroes, of which she has not shown them the example. Avenging God! suspend thy thunder, exhaust thy compassion, in giving her time and courage to repair, if possible, these horrors and atrocities.-Faculties of Negroes.

84

THE ABBE RAYNAL-J. P. BRISSOT-J. SWIFT.

THE ABBE RAYNAL.

Will it be said that he, who wants to make me a slave, does me no injury, but that he only makes use of his rights? Where are those rights? Who hath stamped upon them so sacred a character as to silence mine?

He who supports the system of slavery, is the enemy of the whole human race. He divides it into two societies of legal assasins; the oppressors, and the oppressed. It is the same thing as proclaiming to the world, if you would preserve your life, instantly take away mine, for I want to have yours.

But the negroes, they say, are a race born for slavery; their dispositions are narrow, treacherous, and wicked; they themselves allow the superiority of our understandings, and almost acknowledge the justice of our authority. Yes; the minds of the negroes are contracted, because slavery destroys all the springs of the soul. They are wicked, but not equally so with you. They are treacherous, because they are under no obligation to speak truth to their tyrants. They acknowledge the superiority of our understandings, because we have abused their ignorance. They allow the justice of our authority, because we have abused their weakness.

I shall not be afraid to cite to the tribunal of reason and justice those governments, which tolerate this cruelty, or which even are not ashamed to make it the basis of their power.

JAQUES PIERRE BRISSOT.

When you run over Maryland and Virginia, you conceive yourself in a different world; and you are convinced of it, when you converse with the inhabitants.

They speak not here of projects for freeing the negroes; they praise not the societies of London and America; they read not the works of Clarkson-No; the indolent masters behold with uneasiness the efforts that are making to render freedom universal.

"God has created men of all nations, of all languages, of all colors, equally free; Slavery, in all its forms, in all its degrees, is a violation of the Divine laws; and a degradation of human nature."

[Travels in the United States, 1788.]

JONATHAN SWIFT.

ABI VIATOR,

ET IMITARE, SI POTERIS,

STRENUUM PRO VIRILI LIBERTATIS VINDICEM.

(GO TRAVELLER,

AND IMITATE IF YOU CAN,

A STRENUOUS ADVOCATE OF HUMAN LIBERTY.)

From the Epitaph of Dean Swift,

Written by himself, and engraved on his monument in St.

Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.

J. P. CURRAN-H. GRATTAN-MISS EDGEWORTH. .85

JOHN PHILPOT CURRAN.

"UNIVERSAL EMANCIPATION."—I speak in the spirit of the British Law, which makes liberty commensurate with, and inseparable from, the British soil-which proclaims, even to the stranger and the sojourner, the moment he sets his foot upon British earth, that the ground on which he treads is holy, and consecrated by the genius of Universal Emancipation. No matter in what language his doom may have been pronounced; no matter what complexion incompatible with freedom, an Indian or an African sun may have burnt upon him; no matter in what disastrous battle his liberty may have been cloven down; no matter with what solemnities he may have been devoted upon the altar of slavery; the first moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain, the altar and the god sink together in the dust; his soul walks abroad in her own majesty; his body swells beyond the measure of his chains, that burst from around him, and he stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled, by the irresistible Genius of UNIVERSAL EMANCIPATION.

HENRY GRATTAN.

Liberty-and is this subject a matter of indifference ?-Liberty, which, like the Deity, is an essential spirit best known by its consequences-liberty, which now animates you in your battles by sea and land, and lifts you up proudly superior to your enemies-liberty, that glorious spark and emanation of the Divinity, which fired your ancestors, and taught them to feel like an Hampden, that it was not life, but the condition of living! An Irishman sympathizes in these noble sentiments-wherever he goes-to whatever quarter of the earth he journeys-whatever wind blows his poor garments, let him but have the pride, the glory, the ostentation of liberty!

MARIA EDGEWORTH.

Are we disposed to pity the slave-merchant, who, urged by the maniacal desire for gold, hears, unmoved, the groans of his fellowCreatures, the execrations of mankind, and that "small still voice," which haunts those who are stained with blood?-Practical Education. Granting it to be physically impossible that the world should_exist without rum and sugar and indigo, why could they not be produced by freemen as well as by slaves? If we hired negroes for laborers, instead of purchasing them for slaves, do you think they would not work as well as now? Does any negro, under the fear of the overseer, work harder than a Birmingham journeyman, or a Newcastle collier; who toil for themselves and their families?

The law, in our case, seems to make the right; and the very reverse ought to be done; the right should make the law.

The Americans, in their conduct towards the slaves, were traitors to the cause of human liberty, foul detractors of the democratic principle which he had cherished throughout his political life, and blasphemers of that great and sacred name which they pretended to recognise. For, in their solemn league and covenant, the Declaration of American Independence, they declared that all men (he used their own words) have certain "inalienable rights," ,"-these they defined to be, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To maintain these, they pledged themselves with all the solemnity of an oath, in the presence of Almighty God. The aid which they had invoked from heaven had been awarded to them, but they had violated their awfully solemn compact with the Deity, and set at nought every principle which they professed to hold sacred, by keeping two and a half millions of their fellow-men in bondage. In reprobation of that disgraceful conduct, his humble voice had been heard across the wide waves of the Atlantic. Like the thunder-storm in its strength, it had careered against the breeze, armed with the lightning of Christian truth. (Great cheering.) And let them seek to repress it as they may-let them murder and assassinate in the true spirit of Lynch law; the storm would wax louder and louder around them, till the claims of justice became too strong to be withstood, and the black man would stand up too big for his chains. It seemed, indeed-he hoped what he was about to say was not profanation as if the curse of the Almighty had already overtaken them. For the first time in their political history, disgraceful tumult and anarchy had been witnessed in their cities. Blood had been shed without the sanction of law, and even Sir Robert Peel had been enabled to taunt the Americans with gross inconsistency and lawless proceed