are under no obligation, by any law either natural or divine, to obey. We
are to see them, if refusing the commands of their purchasers, however
weary, or feeble, or indisposed, subject to corporal punishments, and, if
forcibly resisting them, to death. We are to see them in a state of general
degradation and misery. The knowledge, which their oppressors have of their
own crime in having violated the rights of nature, and of the disposition
of the injured to seek all opportunities of revenge, produces a fear, which
dictates to them the necessity of a system of treatment by which they shall
keep up a wide distinction between the two, and by which the noble feelings
of the latter shall be kept down, and their spirits broken. We are to see
them again subject to individual persecution, as anger, or malice, or any
bad passion may suggest. Hence the whip--the chain--the iron-collar. Hence
the various modes of private torture, of which so many accounts have been
truly given. Nor can such horrible cruelties be discovered so as to be made
punishable, while the testimony of any number of the oppressed is invalid
against the oppressors, however they may be offences against the laws. And,
lastly, we are to see their innocent offspring, against whose personal
liberty the shadow of an argument cannot be advanced, inheriting all the
miseries of their parents' lot.

The evil then, as far as it has been hitherto viewed, presents to us in its
three several departments a measure of human suffering not to be
equalled--not to be calculated--not to be described. But would that we
could consider this part of the subject as dismissed! Would that in each of
the departments now examined there was no counterpart left us to
contemplate! But this cannot be. For if there be persons, who suffer
unjustly, there must be others, who oppress. And if there be those who
oppress, there must be to the suffering, which has been occasioned, a
corresponding portion of immorality or guilt.