especially, are their food, and two rags, which neither screen them from
the heat of the day, nor the extraordinary coolness of the night, all
their covering; their sleep very short; their labour almost continual;
they receive no wages, but have twenty lashes for the smallest fault."
_A thoughtful_ person, who had an opportunity of observing the miserable
condition of the Negroes in one of our West India islands, writes thus,
"I met with daily exercise to see the treatment which those miserable
wretches met with from their masters; with but few exceptions. They whip
them most unmercifully on small occasions: you will see their bodies all
whealed and scarred; in short, they seem to set no other value on their
lives, than as they cost them so much money; and are restrained from
killing them, when angry, by no worthier consideration, than that they
lose so much. They act as though they did not look upon them as a race
of human creatures, who have reason, and remembrance of misfortunes, but
as beasts; like oxen, who are stubborn, hardy, and senseless, fit for
burdens, and designed to bear them: they won't allow them to have any
claim to human privileges, or scarce indeed to be regarded as the work
of God. Though it was consistent with the justice of our Maker to
pronounce the sentence on our common parent, and through him on all
succeeding generations, _That he and they should eat their bread by the
sweat of their brows_: yet does it not stand recorded by the same
eternal truth, _That the labourer is worthy of his hire?_ It cannot be
allowed, in natural justice, that there should be a servitude without
condition; a cruel, endless servitude. It cannot be reconcileable to
natural justice, that whole nations, nay, whole continents of men,
should be devoted to do the drudgery of life for others, be dragged away
from their attachments of relations and societies, and be made to serve
the appetite and pleasure of a race of men, whose superiority has been
obtained by illegal force."