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Show 294 LIBERTY AND SLAVERY. with him in order to enrich his feasts and regale his appet{te. II e delighted in such delic~cios. As to his religion, it was even worse than his moral.•; or rather, his religion was a mass of the most ellsgusting immoralities. IIis notion of a God, and the obscene acts by which that notion was worshipped, are too shocking to be mentioned. The vilest sbYe that ever breathed the air of a Clu·istian land eo11ld not begin to conceive the horrid iniquities of such a life. And yet, in the face of all this, we are told-yea, we are perseveringly and eternally told-that "the African has been degraded into a brute" by American slavery! Indeed, if such creatures ever reach the level of simple brutality at all, is it not evident they must be elevated, and not degraded, to it? · The very persons who make the above charge know better. Their own writings furnish the most incontestable proof that they know better. A writer in the Edinburgh Review,* for example, has not only asserted that "slavery degrades its subjects into brutes," but he has the audacity to declare, in regard to slavery in the United States, that "we do not believe that *April No., 18U5. ARGUMENT FROM TUE PUBLIC GOOD. 295 such oppression is to be found in any other part of the world, civilized or uncivili?.Cd. We do not believe that such oppression ever existed before." Yet even this unprincipled writer has, in the very article containing this declaration, shown that he knows better. lie has shown that he knows that the African has been elevated and improved by his servitude in the United States. We shall proceed to convict him out of his own mouth. "Tho African slave-trade was frightful," says lw; "but its prey were savages, a~customcd to suffering and misery, and to endure them with patience almost amounting to apathy. The victims of the American slave-trade have been bred in a highly-cultivated community. Their dispositions have been softened, their intellects sharpened, and their sensibilities excited, by society, by Christianity, and by all the ameliorating but enervating influences of civilization. The savage submits to be enslaved himself, or have his \vife or his child carried oft" by his enemies, as merely a calamity. His misery is not embittered by indignation. Tie suffers only what-if he could-he would intlict. Tic cannot imagine a state of soc:ety in which there shall not be masters an<l slaves, |