of the plantation, than by the luxurous inhabitants of Europe, who are happily strangers to those aggravated provocations, by which our passions are every day irritated and incensed.  Show us, that, of the multitude of negroes, who have within a few years transported themselves to this country,[8] and who are abandoned to themselves; who are corrupted by example, prompted by penury, and instigated by the memory of their wrongs to the commission of crime—­shew us, I say (and the demonstration, if it be possible, cannot be difficult) that a greater proportion of these, than of white men have fallen under the animadversions of justice, and have been sacrificed to your laws.  Though avarice may slander and insult our misery, and though poets heighten the horror of their fables, by representing us as monsters of vice—­the fact is, that, if treated like other men, and admitted to a participation of their rights, we should differ from them in nothing, perhaps, but in our possessing stronger passions, nicer sensibility, and more enthusiastic virtue.

Before so harsh a decision was pronounced upon our nature, we might have expected—­if sad experience had not taught us, to expect nothing but injustice from our adversaries—­that some pains would have been taken, to ascertain, what our nature is; and that we should have been considered, as we are found in our native woods, and not as we now are—­altered and perverted by an inhuman political institution.  But, instead of this, we are examined, not by philosophers, but by interested traders:  not as nature formed us, but as man has depraved us—­and from such an inquiry, prosecuted under such circumstances, the perverseness of our dispositions is said to be established.  Cruel that you are! you make us slaves; you implant in our minds all the vices, which are in some degree, inseparable from that condition; and you then impiously impute to nature, and to God, the origin of those vices, to which you alone have given birth; and punish in us the crimes, of which you are yourselves the authors.

The condition of the slave is in nothing more deplorable, than in its being so unfavorable to the practice of every virtue.  The surest foundation of virtue is love of our fellow creatures; and that affection takes its birth, in the social relations of men to one another.  But to a slave these are all denied.  He never pays or receives the grateful duties of a son—­he never knows or experiences the fond solicitude of a father—­the tender names of husband, of brother, and of friend, are to him unknown.  He has no country to defend and bleed for—­he can relieve no sufferings—­for he looks around in vain, to find a being more wretched than himself.  He can indulge no generous sentiment—­for he sees himself every hour treated with contempt and ridiculed, and distinguished from irrational brutes, by nothing but the severity of punishment.  Would it be surprising, if a slave, labouring under all these disadvantages—­oppressed, insulted,