punished for not doing more than strength and nature will admit of; and sometimes because they cannot on every occasion, fall in with their wanton and capricious humors. One punishment is to flay their backs with cow-hides, or other instruments of barbarity, and then pour on hot rum, superinduced with brine or pickle, rubbed in with a corn husk, in the scorching heat of the sun. For certain, if your judges were sensible of the shocking treatment of the convicts here, they would hang every one of them, as infinitely less punishment; and transport only those, whose crimes deserve the severest death. Better be hanged seven hundred times, than serve seven years here: and there is no redress, for magistrates and all, are equally interested and criminal. If I had a child, I had rather see him, the humblest scavenger in the streets of London, than the loftiest tyrant in America, with a thousand slaves at his beck.'
Old Jewry, 18th February, 1772."
In connexion with this letter, Granville Sharp adverting to the existing slave laws of the Colonies, says in his Journal of the same day, (18th Feb. 1772) "If such laws are not absolutely necessary for the government of slaves, the law-makers must unavoidably allow themselves to be the most cruel and abandoned tyrants upon earth, and perhaps, that ever were on earth. But, on the other hand, if it be said that it is impossible to govern slaves, without such inhuman severity and detestable injustice, the same is an invincible argument against the least toleration of slavery among christians; because temporal profits, cannot compensate the forfeiture of everlasting welfare—that the cries of these much injured people will certainly reach heaven—that the scriptures denounce a tremendous judgment against the man, who shall offend one little one—that it were better for the nation that their American dominions had never existed, or even that they had sunk in the sea, than that the kingdom of Great Britain should be loaded with the horrid guilt of tolerating such abominable wickedness," &c.
It ought to be remembered that while Granville Sharp, thus boldly remonstrated with the Government of his country,
