[Footnote A:  Collection, vol. 2, page 98.]

[Footnote B:  Bosman, page 31.]

CHAP.  VI.

The conduct of the Europeans and Africans compared.  Slavery more tolerable amongst the antients than in our colonies.  As christianity prevailed amongst the barbarous nations, the inconsistency of slavery became more apparent.  The charters of manumission, granted in the early times of christianity, founded on an apprehension of duty to God.  The antient Britons, and other European nations, in their original state, no less barbarous than the Negroes.  Slaves in Guinea used with much greater lenity than the Negroes are in the colonies.—­Note.  How the slaves are treated in Algiers, as also in Turkey.

Such is the woeful corruption of human nature, that every practice which flatters our pride and covetousness, will find its advocates!  This is manifestly the case in the matter before us; the savageness of the Negroes in some of their customs, and particularly their deviating so far from the feelings of humanity, as to join in captivating and selling each other, gives their interested oppressors a pretence for representing them as unworthy of liberty, and the natural rights of mankind.  But these sophisters turn the argument full upon themselves, when they instigate the poor creatures to such shocking impiety, by every means that fantastic subtilty can suggest; thereby shewing in their own conduct, a more glaring proof of the same depravity, and, if there was any reason in the argument, a greater unfitness for the same precious enjoyment:  for though some of the ignorant Africans may be thus corrupted by their intercourse with the baser of the European natives, and the use of strong liquors, this is no excuse for high-professing christians; bred in a civilized country, with so many advantages unknown to the Africans, and pretending to a superior degree of gospel light.  Nor can it justify them in raising up fortunes to themselves from the misery of others, and calmly projecting voyages for the seizure of men naturally as free as themselves; and who, they know, are no otherwise to be procured than by such barbarous means, as none but those hardened wretches, who are lost to every sense of christian compassion, can make use of.  Let us diligently compare, and impartially weigh, the situation of those ignorant Negroes, and these enlightened christians; then lift up the scale and say, which of the two are the greater savages.

Slavery has been of a long time in practice in many parts of Asia; it was also in usage among the Romans when that empire flourished; but, except in some particular instances, it was rather a reasonable servitude, no ways comparable to the unreasonable and unnatural service extorted from the Negroes in our colonies.  A late learned author,[A] speaking of those times which succeeded the dissolution of that empire, acquaints us, that as christianity prevailed, it very much removed those