Omniana/Volume 1/The Vices of Slaves no excuse for Slavery
121. The vices of Slaves no excuse for Slavery.
It often happens, that the slave himself has neither the power nor the wish to be free. He is then brutified; but this apathy is the dire effect of slavery, and so far from being a justifying cause, that it contains the grounds of its bitterest condemnation. The Carolingian race bred up the Merovingi as beasts; and then assigned their unworthiness as the satisfactory reason of their dethronement. Alas! the human being is more easily weaned from the habit of commanding than from that of abject obedience. The slave loses his soul when he loses his master: even as the dog that has lost himself in the street, howls and whines till he has found the house again, where he had been kicked and cudgelled, and half-starved to boot. As we however or our ancestors must have inoculated our fellow-creatures with this wasting disease of the soul, it becomes our duty to cure him: and though we cannot immediately make him free, yet we can and ought to, put him in the way of becoming so at some future time, if not in his own person yet in that of his children. The French are not capable of freedom. Grant this! but does this fact justify the ungrateful traitor, whose every measure has been to make them still more incapable of it?