[Footnote 091:  Treatise upon the Trade from Great Britain to Africa, by an African merchant.]

[Footnote 092:  We mean such only as are natives of the countries which we mention, and whose ancestors have been settled there for a certain period of time.]

[Footnote 093:  Herodotus.  Euterpe. p. 80.  Editio Stephani, printed 1570.]

[Footnote 094:  This circumstance confirms what we said in a former note, (Footnote 085), that even if two nations were to be found in the same parallel, one of whom was black, and the other white, it would form no objection against the hypothesis of climate, as one of them might have been new settlers from a distant country.]

[Footnote 095:  Suppose, without the knowledge of any historian, they had made such considerable conquests, as to have settled themselves at the distance of 1000 miles in any one direction from Colchis, still they must have changed their colour.  For had they gone in an Eastern or Western direction, they must have been of the same colour as the Circassians; if to the north, whiter; if to the south, of a copper.  There are no people within that distance of Colchis, who are black.]

[Footnote 096:  There are a particular people among those transported from Africa to the colonies, who immediately on receiving punishment, destroy themselves.  This is a fact which the receivers are unable to contradict.]

* * * * *

CHAP.  IX.

The reader may perhaps think, that the receivers have by this time expended all their arguments, but their store is not so easily exhausted.  They are well aware that justice, nature, and religion, will continue, as they have ever uniformly done, to oppose their conduct.  This has driven them to exert their ingenuity, and has occasioned that multiplicity of arguments to be found in the present question.

These arguments are of a different complexion from the former.  They consist in comparing the state of slaves with that of some of the classes of free men, and in certain scenes of felicity, which the former are said to enjoy.

It is affirmed that the punishments which the Africans undergo, are less severe than the military; that their life is happier than that of the English peasant; that they have the advantages of manumission; that they have their little spots of ground, their holy-days, their dances; in short, that their life is a scene of festivity and mirth, and that they are much happier in the colonies than in their own country.

These representations, which have been made out with much ingenuity and art, may have had their weight with the unwary; but they will never pass with men of consideration and sense, who are accustomed to estimate the probability of things, before they admit them to be true.  Indeed the bare assertion, that their situation is even comfortable, contains its own refutation, or at least leads us to suspect that the person, who asserted it, has omitted some important considerations in the account.  Such we shall shew to have been actually the case, and that the representations of the receivers, when stripped of their glossy ornaments, are but empty declamation.