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CHAP.  V.

Some people may suppose, from the melancholy account that has been given in the preceding chapter, that we have been absolutely dealing in romance:  that the scene exhibited is rather a dreary picture of the imagination, than a representation of fact.  Would to heaven, for the honour of human nature, that this were really the case!  We wish we could say, that we have no testimony to produce for any of our assertions, and that our description of the general treatment of slaves has been greatly exaggerated.

But the receivers, notwithstanding the ample and disinterested evidence, that can be brought on the occasion, do not admit the description to be true.  They say first, “that if the slavery were such as has been now represented, no human being could possibly support it long.”  Melancholy truth! the wretched Africans generally perish in their prime.  Let them reflect upon the prodigious supplies that are annually required, and their argument will be nothing less than a confession, that the slavery has been justly depicted.

They appeal next to every man’s own reason, and desire him to think seriously, whether “self-interest will not always restrain the master from acts of cruelty to the slave, and whether such accounts therefore, as the foregoing, do not contain within themselves, their own refutation.”  We answer, “No.”  For if this restraining principle be as powerful as it is imagined, why does not the general conduct of men afford us a better picture?  What is imprudence, or what is vice, but a departure from every man’s own interest, and yet these are the characteristicks of more than half the world?—­

—­But, to come more closely to the present case, self-interest will be found but a weak barrier against the sallies of passion:  particularly where it has been daily indulged in its greatest latitude, and there are no laws to restrain its calamitous effects.  If the observation be true, that passion is a short madness, then it is evident that self-interest, and every other consideration, must be lost, so long as it continues.  We cannot have a stronger instance of this, than in a circumstance related in the second part of this Essay, “that though the Africans have gone to war for the express purpose of procuring slaves, yet so great has been their resentment at the resistance they have frequently found, that their passion has entirely got the better of their interest, and they have murdered all without any discrimination, either of age or sex.”  Such may be presumed to be the case with the no less savage receivers.  Impressed with the most haughty and tyrannical notions, easily provoked, accustomed to indulge their anger, and, above all, habituated to scenes of cruelty, and unawed by the fear of laws, they will hardly be found to be exempt from the common failings of human nature, and to spare an unlucky slave, at a time when men of cooler temper, and better regulated passions, are so frequently blind to their own interest.