What! the blacks our equals!  Have not they eyes, ears, a shape, and organs like ours?  Does nature follow another order, other laws for them?—­Have not they speech, that peculiar characteristic of humanity?  But then the colour!  What of that?  Are the pale white Albinos, the olive or copper coloured Indians also of different species!  Who does not know that colour is accidental.  They are not our equals!  Have not they the same faculties—­reason, memory, imagination?  Yes, you reply, but they have written no books.  Who told you so?  Who told you there were no learned blacks?  And supposing it were so, if none but authors are men, the whole human race is different from us.

Shall I tell you why there are no authors or men of learning among the Negroes?  What has made you what you are?  Education and circumstances!—­Now where are the Negroes favoured by either?  Consider them wherever they are to be found.—­In Africa, wretchedly enslaved by domestic tyrants; in our islands perpetual martyrs; in the southern United States, the meanest of slaves; in the northern, domestics; in Europe, universally contemned, every where proscribed, like the Jews; in a word, every where in a state of debasement.

I have been told that there are blacks of property in the northern parts of America; but these, like the other settlers, are no more than sensible farmers or traders.—­There are no authors[3] among them, because there are few rich and idle people in America.

What spring of action could raise a Negro from his debased condition? the road to glory and honor is impassible to him:  What then should he write for?  Besides, the blacks have reason to detest the sciences, for their oppressors cultivate them but they do not make them better.

Shall we say that the Indians or Arabs are not our equals, because they despise both our arts and our sciences? or the Quakers, because they neither respect academies nor wits?

In short, if you will deny the Negroes souls, energy, sensibility, gratitude or beneficence, I oppose you to yourself, I might quote your own anecdote of Mr. Langdon’s Negro, and abundance of other well known facts in favour of the blacks.  You may find some striking ones in the Abbe Raynals’ philosophical history.  One of them would have been sufficient.  The Negro who killed himself when his master who had injured him was in his power, was superior to Epictetus, and the existence of a single Negro of so sublime a character, ennobles all his kind.

But how could you judge whether the blacks were different from the whites, who saw them only in a state of slavery and wretchedness?  Do we estimate beauty by the figure of a Laplander? magnanimity by the soul of a courtier? or intelligence by the stupidity of an Esquimaux?

If the traces of humanity were so much weakened and effaced in the Negroes, that you did not recognize them, I conclude not that they do not belong to our species, but that they must have been cruelly tormented to reduce them to this state of degeneracy.  I do not conclude that they are not men, but that the Europeans who kidnap the blacks, are not worthy of the name.