institution of slavery, tends to the subversion of justice and morality
in the world. The best treatment possible from the colonists cannot
compensate for so great a loss. Freedom, in its meanest circumstances, is
infinitely preferable to slavery, though it were in golden fetters, and
accompanied with the greatest splendour, ease, and abundance.

If then the greatest advantages are not a sufficient compensation for the
loss of liberty, what shall we think of those who deny them the smallest?
But one would imagine that, exclusive of every other motive, personal
safety would even induce the colonists to provide for them those
advantages which would render them as easy and contented as possible with
their condition. Were they duly impressed with a sense of their duty to
God and man; were they taught the common rules of honesty, justice, and
truth; were their dispositions to humility, submission, and obedience,
cultivated and improved; would not such advantages place them more on a
level with hired servants, who pay a ready and cheerful obedience to
their masters? Were they favoured with the privileges of Christianity,
would they not be more faithful and diligent, and better reconciled to
their servile condition? Besides, Christianity has a tendency to tame
fierce and wild tempers. It is not an easy thing to display the great and
extensive influence which the fear of God, and the expectation of a
future account, would have upon their minds: Christianity enforces the
obligations of morality, and produces a more regular and uniform
obedience to its laws. A due sense of the divine presence, the hopes of
his approbation, and the fears of his displeasure, are motives that
operate powerfully with the human mind, and in fact would prove stronger
barriers against trespasses, murders, plots, and conspiracies, than any
number of stripes from the hands of men, or even the terrors of certain
death. Whereas, to keep the minds of human creatures under clouds of
darkness, neither disciplined by reason, nor regulated by religion, is a