to the horrid extremity of putting a period to their lives.  Now if these suicides are frequent, (which no person can deny) what are they but a proof, that the situation of those who destroy themselves must have been insupportably wretched:  and if the thought of returning to their country after death, when they have experienced the colonial joys, constitutes their supreme felicity, what are they but a proof, that they think there is as much difference between the two situations, as there is between misery and delight?

Nor is the assertion of the receivers less liable to a refutation in the instance of those, who terminate their own existence, than of those, whom nature releases from their persecutions.  They die with a smile upon their face, and their funerals are attended by a vast concourse of their countrymen, with every possible demonstration of joy[106].  But why this unusual mirth, if their departed brother has left an happy place?  Or if he has been taken from the care of an indulgent master, who consulted his pleasures, and administered to his wants?  But alas, it arises from hence, that he is gone to his happy country:  a circumstance, sufficient of itself, to silence a myriad of those specious arguments, which the imagination has been racked, and will always be racked to produce, in favour of a system of tyranny and oppression.

It remains only, that we should now conclude the chapter with a fact, which will shew that the account, which we have given of the situation of slaves, is strictly true, and will refute at the same time all the arguments which have hitherto been, and may yet be brought by the receivers, to prove that their treatment is humane.  In one of the western colonies of the Europeans, [107]six hundred and fifty thousand slaves were imported within an hundred years; at the expiration of which time, their whole posterity were found to amount to one hundred and forty thousand.  This fact will ascertain the treatment of itself.  For how shamefully must these unfortunate people have been oppressed?  What a dreadful havock must famine, fatigue, and cruelty, have made among them, when we consider, that the descendants of six hundred and fifty thousand people in the prime of life, gradually imported within a century, are less numerous than those, which only ten thousand[108] would have produced in the same period, under common advantages, and in a country congenial to their constitutions?

But the receivers have probably great merit on the occasion.  Let us therefore set it down to their humanity.  Let us suppose for once, that this incredible waste of the human species proceeds from a benevolent design; that, sensible of the miseries of a servile state, they resolve to wear out, as fast as they possibly can, their unfortunate slaves, that their miseries may the sooner end, and that a wretched posterity may be prevented from sharing their parental condition.  Now, whether this is the plan of reasoning which the receivers adopt, we cannot take upon us to decide; but true it is, that the effect produced is exactly the same, as if they had reasoned wholly on this benevolent principle.