as his property. The judges, either from shame, or a sense of justice, refused his demand."[1]
Some people speculate in what are called refuse slaves; i. e. the poor diseased ones. Many of them die in the piazzas of the auctioneers; and sometimes, in the agonies of death, they are sold as low as a dollar.
Even this is better than to be unprotected on the wide ocean in the power of such wild beasts as I have described. It may seem incredible to some that human nature is capable of so much depravity. But the confessions of pirates show how habitual scenes of blood and violence harden the heart of man; and history abundantly proves that despotic power produces a fearful species of moral insanity. The wanton cruelties of Nero, Caligula, Domitian, and many of the officers of the Inquisition, seem like the frantic acts of madmen.
The public has, however, a sense of justice, which can never be entirely perverted. Since the time when Clarkson, Wilberforce and Fox made the horrors of the slave trade understood, the slave captain, or slave jockey is spontaneously and almost universally regarded with dislike and horror. Even in the slave-holding States it is deemed disreputable to associate with a professed slave-trader, though few perhaps would think it any harm to bargain with him. This public feeling makes itself felt so strongly, that men engaged in what is called the African traffic, kept it a secret, if they could, even before the laws made it hazardous.
No man of the least principle could for a moment think of engaging in such enterprises; and if he have any feeling, it is soon destroyed by familiarity with scenes of guilt and anguish. The result is, that the slave-trade is a monopoly in the hands of the very wicked; and this is one reason why it has always been profitable.
Yet even the slave trade has had its champions—of course among those who had money invested in it.
- ↑ The Abbé Grégoire's Inquiry into the Intellect and Morals of Negroes.
