[Footnote B: Bosman, page 31.]





CHAP. VI.


The conduct of the Europeans and Africans compared. Slavery more
tolerable amongst the antients than in our colonies. As christianity
prevailed amongst the barbarous nations, the inconsistency of slavery
became more apparent. The charters of manumission, granted in the early
times of christianity, founded on an apprehension of duty to God. The
antient Britons, and other European nations, in their original state, no
less barbarous than the Negroes. Slaves in Guinea used with much greater
lenity than the Negroes are in the colonies.--Note. How the slaves are
treated in Algiers, as also in Turkey.

Such is the woeful corruption of human nature, that every practice which
flatters our pride and covetousness, will find its advocates! This is
manifestly the case in the matter before us; the savageness of the
Negroes in some of their customs, and particularly their deviating so
far from the feelings of humanity, as to join in captivating and selling
each other, gives their interested oppressors a pretence for
representing them as unworthy of liberty, and the natural rights of
mankind. But these sophisters turn the argument full upon themselves,
when they instigate the poor creatures to such shocking impiety, by
every means that fantastic subtilty can suggest; thereby shewing in
their own conduct, a more glaring proof of the same depravity, and, if