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Faints, if not screen'd from sultry suns, and pines
Beneath the hardship of an hour's delay
Of needful nutriment ;-when Liberty
Is priz'd so dearly, that the slightest breath
That ruffles but her mantle, can awake
To arms unwarlike nations, and can rouse
Confed'rate states to vindicate her claims:-
How shall the suff'rer man his fellow doom
To ills he mourns or spurns at; tear with stripes
His quiv'ring flesh; with hunger and with thirst
Waste his emaciate frame; in ceaseless toils
Exhaust his vital powers; and bind his limbs
In galling chains! Shall he, whose fragile form
Demands continual blessings to support
Its complicated texture, air, and food,
Raiment, alternate rest, and kindly skies,
And healthful seasons, dare with impious voice
To ask those mercies, whilst his selfish aim
Arrests the general freedom of their course;
And, gratified beyond his utmost wish,
Debars another from the bounteous store!

Wrongs of Africa.

HANNAH MORE.

See the dire victim torn from social life,
The shrieking babe, the agonizing wife!
She! wretch forlorn, is dragg'd by hostile hands
To distant tyrants, sold to distant lands,
Transmitted miseries and successive chains,
The sole sad heritage her child obtains!
E'en this last wretched boon their foes deny,
To live together, or together die.

By felon hands, by one relentless stroke,
See the fond links of feeling nature broke!
The fibres twisting round a parent's heart,
Torn from their grasp, and bleeding as they part.
What wrongs, what injuries does Oppression plead,
To smooth the crime and sanctify the deed?
What strange offence, what aggravated sin ?
They stand convicted of a darker skin!

JAMES MONTGOMERY.

Lives there a reptile baser than the slave?
Loathsome as death, corrupted as the grave.
See the dull creole, at his pompous board,
Attendant vassals cringing round their lord;
Satiate with food, his heavy eyelids close,
Voluptuous minions fan him to repose;
Prone on the noonday couch he lolls in vain,
Delirious slumbers rack his maudlin brain;
He starts with horror from bewildering dreams,
His bloodshot eye with fire and frenzy gleams,
He stalks abroad; through all his wonted rounds,
The negro trembles, and the lash resounds,
And cries of anguish shrilling through the air,
To distant fields his dread approach declare.

Mark, as he passes, every head declined;
Then slowly raised, to curse him from behind.
This is the veriest wretch on nature's face,
Own'd by no country, spurn'd by every race;
The tether'd tyrant of one narrow span,
The bloated vampyre of a living man;
His frame, a fungus form, of dunghill birth,
That taints the air, and rots above the earth:
His soul! has he a soul, whose sensual breast
Of selfish passions is a serpent's nest?
Who follows, headlong, ignorant, and blind,
The vague brute-instinct of an idiot mind;

Whose heart, 'midst scenes of suffering, senseless grown,
E'en from his mother's lap was chilled to stone;
Whose torpid pulse no social feelings move;

A stranger to the tenderness of love;
His motley harem charms his gloating eye,
Where ebon, brown, and olive beauties vie;
His children sprung alike from sloth and vice,
Are born his slaves, and loved at market price.
Has he a soul?-With his departing breath,
A form shall hail him at the gates of death,

The spectre Conscience! shrieking through the gloom, "Man, we shall meet again beyond the tomb!"

THOMAS CAMPBELL.

And say, supernal Powers! who deeply scan
Heav'n's dark decree, unfathom'd yet by man,
When shall the world call down to cleanse her shame,

That embryo spirit, yet without a name,

That friend of Nature, whose avenging hands
Shall burst the Lybian's adamantine bands?
Who, sternly marking on his native soil,

The blood, the tears, the anguish, and the toil,
Shall bid each righteous heart exult, to see
Peace to the slave, and vengeance on the free!

Yet, yet, degraded man! th' expected day
That breaks your bitter cup, is far away;
Trade, wealth, and fashion, ask you still to bleed,
And holy men give scripture for the deed;
Scourg'd and debas'd no Briton stoops to save
A wretch, a coward; yes, because a slave!

Eternal Nature! when thy giant hand

Had heav'd the floods, and fix'd the trembling land,
When life sprung startling at thy plastic call,
Endless her form, and Man the lord of all!
Say, was that lordly form inspir'd by thee
To wear eternal chains, and bow the knee?
Was man ordain'd the slave of man to toil,
Yok'd with the brutes, and fetter'd to the soil;
Weigh'd in a tyrant's balance with his gold?
No! Nature stamp'd us in a heavenly mould!
She bade no wretch his thankless labor urge,
Nor, trembling, take the pittance and the scourge!
No homeless Lybian, on the stormy deep,
To call upon his country's name and weep!

Pleasures of Hope.

ERASMUS DARWIN.

Wrench'd the red scourge from proud Oppression's hands,
And broke, curst Slavery! thy iron bands.

E'en now, e'en now, on yonder western shores
Weeps pale Despair, and writhing Anguish roars;
E'en now in Afric's groves with hideous yell
Fierce SLAVERY stalks and slips the dogs of hell;
From vale to vale the gathering cries rebound
And sable nations tremble at the sound.—
-Who right the injured, and reward the brave,
Stretch your strong arm, for ye have power to save!
Throned in the vaulted heart, his dread resort;
Inexorable CONSCIENCE holds his court;
With still small voice the plots of guilt alarms,
Bares his masked brow, his lifted hand disarms;
But, wrapp'd in night, with terrors all his own,
He speaks in thunders when the deed is done."
Hear him, ye Senates! hear this truth sublime,
He who allows oppression shares the crime.

"Botanic Garden."

JOHN STEWART.

It is from the fatal preponderance of passion over reason, that the atrocious and damnable TRADE in HUMAN FLESH is sanctified; an act so infamous, that could all the crimes which history records be collected and consolidated into one, it would lose its nature of atrocity and become a virtue, when placed in comparison with the slave-trade, considered in its double flagitiousness of first buying the human species and then destroying them. It is inconceivable, that an assembly of a nation can be guilty of an act, that no individual who has not degraded himself below his species, and familiarized his ear to the association of his name with that of villain and scoundrel but would feel a horror of committing. Though legislative accomplices may cover his shame, and screen him from public censure, yet how, in the name of truth, if he possesses a well-organized mind and body, and but a common share of reflection, (or rather the pre-eminent and characteristic share of an Englishman,) how can he esteem himself, when conscience will ever upbraid him with the participation in an act whose flagitiousness is so great, that unless he renounces the character of man, his very share would be sufficient to sink him into the most ignominious contempt, and draw upon him more remorse than would the catalogue of all the acted and imagined crimes in nature.-The Moral State of Nations.

SIR WILLIAM JONES.

I pass with haste by the coast of Africa, whence my mind turns with indignation at the abominable traffic in the human species, from which a part of our countrymen dare to derive their inauspicious wealth. Sugar, it has been said, would be dear if it were not worked by blacks; as if the most laborious, the most dangerous works were not carried on in every country by freemen; in fact, they are so carried on with infinitely more advantage, for there is alacrity in a consciousness of freedom, and a gloomy, sullen indolence in a consciousness of slavery. But let sugar be as dear as it may, it is better to eat none, to eat honey, if sweetness only be palatable; better to eat aloes or coloquintida, than violate a primary law of nature, impressed on every heart not imbruted by avarice; than rob one human creature of those eternal rights of which no law upon earth can justly deprive him.

What constitutes a State?

Not high raised monuments or labor'd mound,
Thick wall or moated gate;

Not cities proud, with spires and turrets crown'd;
Not bays and broad arm'd ports,

Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride.
Not starr'd and spangled courts,

Where low brow'd baseness wafts perfume to pride.
No! men, high-minded men!

With powers as far above dull brutes endued
In forest, brake, or den,

As beasts excel cold rocks and brambles rude;
Men who their duties know,

But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain,
Prevent the long aim'd blow,

And crush the tyrant while they rend the chain!
These constitute a State.

True Politics.

EDWARD LYTTON BULWER.

It is in vain that they oppose OPINION; any thing else they may subdue. They may conquer wind, water, nature itself; but to the progress of that secret, subtile, pervading spirit, their imagination can devise, their strength can accomplish, no bar; its votaries they may seize, they may destroy; itself, they cannot touch. If they check it in one place, it invades them in another. They cannot build - a wall across the whole earth; and even if they could, it would pass over its summit! Chains cannot bind it, for it is immaterial-nor dungeons enclose it, for it is universal. Over the faggot and the scaffold-over the bending bodies which they pile against its path, it sweeps on with a noiseless, but unceasing march. Do they bring

armies against it, it presents to them no palpable object to oppose. Its camp is the universe; its asylum the bosoms of their own soldiers. Let them depopulate, destroy as they please, to each extremity of the earth; but as long as they have a single supporter themselvesas long as they leave a single individual into whom that spirit can enter, so long they will have the same labors to encounter, and the same enemy to subdue.-The Spanish Patriot Riego's Reflections on Tyrants.

HENRY BROUGHAM.

Tell me not of rights-talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves. I deny the right-I acknowledge not the property. The principles, the feelings, of our common nature, rise in rebellion against it. Be the appeal made to the understanding or to the heart, the sentence is the same that rejects it. In vain you tell me of laws that sanction such a claim! There is a law above all the enactments of human codes-the same throughout the world, the same in all times such as it was before the daring genius of Columbus pierced the night of ages, and opened to one world the sources of power, wealth, and knowledge; to another, all unutterable woes; such it is at this day it is the law written by the finger of God on the heart of man; and by that law, unchangeable and eternal, while men despise fraud, and loathe rapine, and abhor blood, they shall reject with indignation the wild and guilty fantasy, that man can hold property in man! In vain you appeal to treaties, to covenants between nations. The covenants of the Almighty, whether the old or the new, denounce such unholy pretensions. To those laws did they of old refer, who maintained the African trade. Such treaties did they cite, and not untruly; for by one shameful compact, you bartered the glories of Blenheim for the traffic in blood! Yet, in despite of law and of treaties, that infernal traffic is now destroyed, and its votaries put to death like other pirates. How came this change to pass? Not assuredly by parliament leading the way; but the country at length awoke; the indignation of the people was kindled; it descended in thunder, and smote the traffic, and scattered its guilty profits to the winds. . . . .

One word before I sit down, and that shall be in reference to those other countries which, by a singular coincidence, obtained their freedom about the same period when we began our effective struggle -the Americans having obtained their political freedom about the time when Thomas Clarkson began to agitate the question of the slave-trade, and the French having obtained their restoration to freedom in the very same month when Yorkshire enabled us, by the spirit which it then exhibited, to accomplish the great object of emancipation, for which we had previously so long struggled in vain. That being the case, is it not melancholy as it regards France-is it not unspeakably mournful-nay, is it not absolutely monstrous (I use the term

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