this, knowing the way in which he comes into their hands, and who chain,
and imprison, and scourge him? Do the moral feelings of those persons
escape without injury, whose hearts are hardened? And can the hearts of
those be otherwise than hardened, who are familiar with the tears and
groans of innocent strangers forcibly torn away from every thing that is
dear to them in life, who are accustomed to see them on board their
vessels in a state of suffocation and in the agonies of despair, and who
are themselves in the habit of the cruel use of arbitrary power?

The counterpart of the evil in its third branch is to be seen in the
conduct of those, who, when these miserable people have been landed,
purchase and carry them to their respective homes. And let us see
whether a mass of wickedness is not generated also in the present case.
Can those have nothing to answer for, who separate the faithful ties
which nature and religion have created? Can their feelings be otherwise
than corrupted, who consider their fellow-creatures as brutes, or treat
those as cattle, who may become the temples of the Holy Spirit, and in
whom the Divinity disdains not himself to dwell? Is there no injustice
in forcing men to labour without wages? Is there no breach of duty, when
we are commanded to clothe the naked, and feed the hungry, and visit the
sick and in prison, in exposing them to want, in torturing them by cruel
punishment, and in grinding them down by hard labour, so as to shorten
their days? Is there no crime in adopting a system, which keeps down all
the noble faculties of their souls, and which positively debases and
corrupts their nature? Is there no crime in perpetuating these evils
among their innocent offspring? And finally, besides all these crimes,
is there not naturally in the familiar sight of the exercise, but more
especially in the exercise itself, of uncontrolled power, that which
vitiates the internal man? In seeing misery stalk daily over the land,
do not all become insensibly hardened? By giving birth to that misery