A poor Creole negro I knew well, who, after having been often thus transported from island to island, at last resided in Montserrat.  This man used to tell me many melancholy tales of himself.  Generally, after he had done working for his master, he used to employ his few leisure moments to go a fishing.  When he had caught any fish, his master would frequently take them from him without paying him; and at other times some other white people would serve him in the same manner.  One day he said to me, very movingly, ’Sometimes when a white man take away my fish I go to my maser, and he get me my right; and when my maser by strength take away my fishes, what me must do?  I can’t go to any body to be righted; then’ said the poor man, looking up above ’I must look up to God Mighty in the top for right.’  This artless tale moved me much, and I could not help feeling the just cause Moses had in redressing his brother against the Egyptian.  I exhorted the man to look up still to the God on the top, since there was no redress below.  Though I little thought then that I myself should more than once experience such imposition, and read the same exhortation hereafter, in my own transactions in the islands; and that even this poor man and I should some time after suffer together in the same manner, as shall be related hereafter.

Nor was such usage as this confined to particular places or individuals; for, in all the different islands in which I have been (and I have visited no less than fifteen) the treatment of the slaves was nearly the same; so nearly indeed, that the history of an island, or even a plantation, with a few such exceptions as I have mentioned, might serve for a history of the whole.  Such a tendency has the slave-trade to debauch men’s minds, and harden them to every feeling of humanity!  For I will not suppose that the dealers in slaves are born worse than other men—­No; it is the fatality of this mistaken avarice, that it corrupts the milk of human kindness and turns it into gall.  And, had the pursuits of those men been different, they might have been as generous, as tender-hearted and just, as they are unfeeling, rapacious and cruel.  Surely this traffic cannot be good, which spreads like a pestilence, and taints what it touches! which violates that first natural right of mankind, equality and independency, and gives one man a dominion over his fellows which God could never intend!  For it raises the owner to a state as far above man as it depresses the slave below it; and, with all the presumption of human pride, sets a distinction between them, immeasurable in extent, and endless in duration!  Yet how mistaken is the avarice even of the planters?  Are slaves more useful by being thus humbled to the condition of brutes, than they would be if suffered to enjoy the privileges of men?  The freedom which diffuses health and prosperity throughout Britain answers you—­No.  When you make men slaves you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an