But alas! you do not only attempt to defend yourselves by these arguments, but even dare to give your actions the appearance of lenity, and assume merit from your baseness! and how first ought you particularly to blush, when you assert, “that prisoners of war are only purchased from the hands of their conquerors, to deliver them from death.”  Ridiculous defence! can the most credulous believe it?  You entice the Africans to war; you foment their quarrels; you supply them with arms and ammunition, and all—­from the motives of benevolence.  Does a man set fire to an house, for the purpose of rescuing the inhabitants from the flames?  But if they are only purchased, to deliver them from death; why, when they are delivered into your hands, as protectors, do you torture them with hunger?  Why do you kill them with fatigue?  Why does the whip deform their bodies, or the knife their limbs?  Why do you sentence them to death? to a death, infinitely more excruciating than that from which you so kindly saved them?  What answer do you make to this? for if you had not humanely preserved them from the hands of their conquerors, a quick death perhaps, and that in the space of a moment, had freed them from their pain:  but on account of your favour and benevolence, it is known, that they have lingered years in pain and agony, and have been sentenced, at last, to a dreadful death for the most insignificant offence.

Neither can we allow the other argument to be true, on which you found your merit; “that you take them from their country for their own convenience; because Africa, scorched with incessant heat, and subject to the most violent rains and tempests, is unwholesome, and unfit to be inhabited.”  Preposterous men! do you thus judge from your own feelings?  Do you thus judge from your own constitution and frame?  But if you suppose that the Africans are incapable of enduring their own climate, because you cannot endure it yourselves; why do you receive them into slavery?  Why do you not measure them here by the same standard?  For if you are unable to bear hunger and thirst, chains and imprisonment, wounds and torture, why do you not suppose them incapable of enduring the same treatment?  Thus then is your argument turned against yourselves.  But consider the answer which the Scythians gave the AEgyptians, when they contended about the antiquity of their original[054], “That nature, when she first distinguished countries by different degrees of heat and cold, tempered the bodies of animals, at the same instant, to endure the different situations:  that as the climate of Scythia was severer than that of AEgypt, so were the bodies of the Scythians harder, and as capable of enduring the severity of their atmosphere, as the AEgyptians the temperateness of their own.”