for ever from their friends, their relatives, and their country?  Where shall I find language to paint in appropriate colours the horror of mind brought on by thoughts of their future unknown destination, of which they can augur nothing but misery from all that they have yet seen?  How shall I make known their situation, while labouring under painful disease, or while struggling in the suffocating holds of their prisons, like animals inclosed in an exhausted receiver?  How shall I describe their feelings, as exposed to all the personal indignities, which lawless appetite or brutal passion may suggest?  How shall I exhibit their sufferings as determining to refuse sustenance and die, or as resolving to break their chains, and, disdaining to live as slaves, to punish their oppressors?  How shall I give an idea of their agony, when under various punishments and tortures for their reputed crimes?  Indeed every part of this subject defies my powers, and I must therefore satisfy myself and the reader with a general representation, or in the words of a celebrated member of Parliament, that “Never was so much human suffering condensed in so small a space.”

I come now to the evil, as it has been proved to arise in the third case; or to consider the situation of the unhappy victims of the trade, when their painful voyages are over, or after they have been landed upon their destined shores.  And here we are to view them first under the degrading light of cattle.  We are to see them examined, handled, selected, separated, and sold.  Alas! relatives are separated from relatives, as if, like cattle, they had no rational intellect, no power of feeling the nearness of relationship, nor sense of the duties belonging to the ties of life!  We are next to see them labouring, and this for the benefit of those, to whom they are under no obligation, by any law either natural or divine, to obey.  We are to see them, if refusing the commands of their purchasers, however weary, or feeble, or indisposed, subject to corporal punishments, and, if forcibly resisting them, to death.  We are to see them in a state of general degradation and misery.  The knowledge, which their oppressors have of their own crime in having violated the rights of nature, and of the disposition of the injured to seek all opportunities of revenge, produces a fear, which dictates to them the necessity of a system of treatment by which they shall keep up a wide distinction between the two, and by which the noble feelings of the latter shall be kept down, and their spirits broken.  We are to see them again subject to individual persecution, as anger, or malice, or any bad passion may suggest.  Hence the whip—­the chain—­the iron-collar.  Hence the various modes of private torture, of which so many accounts have been truly given.  Nor can such horrible cruelties be discovered so as to be made punishable, while the testimony of any number of the oppressed is invalid against the oppressors, however they may be offences against the laws.  And, lastly, we are to see their innocent offspring, against whose personal liberty the shadow of an argument cannot be advanced, inheriting all the miseries of their parents’ lot.