trade. Had men continued to conduct it according to his plan and
proposal, and hands been transported by their voluntary consent to labour
in burning climates, where Europeans are disqualified by nature for the
task; had the Spaniards allowed them the common privileges of servants,
after they had cleared the charges they cost them; had negroes been
bought from the flames, to which in some countries they were devoted on
their falling prisoners of war, and in others sacrificed at the funeral
obsequies of the great and powerful among themselves; in short, had they
been by this traffic delivered from torture or death, European merchants
might have some excuse to plead in its vindication. But, according to the
common mode in which it has been conducted, we must confess it a
difficult matter to conceive a single argument in its defence. It is
contrary to all laws of nature and nations to entice, inveigle and compel
such multitudes of human creatures, who never injured us, from their
native land, and dispose of them like flocks of sheep and cattle to the
highest bidder; and, what compleats the cruelty and injustice of the
traffic, to consign them over to ignorance, barbarism, and perpetual
slavery. After this, where will insatiable avarice stop? As a free and
independent people, they had unquestionably an equal right to make slaves
of the inhabitants of Europe. Nature has given the people of the one
continent no superiority over those of the other; the advantages of
Europeans were the effects only of art and improvement. And though policy
has given countenance and sanction to the trade, yet every candid and
impartial man must confess, that it is atrocious and unjustifiable in
every light in which it can be viewed, and turns merchants into a band of
robbers, and trade into atrocious acts of fraud and violence.

[Sidenote] A.D. 1584. Virginia settled.

We shall now return to those naval adventurers, whose object was the