, sufficient of itself, to silence a myriad of those
specious arguments, which the imagination has been racked, and will
always be racked to produce, in favour of a system of tyranny and
oppression.

It remains only, that we should now conclude the chapter with a fact,
which will shew that the account, which we have given of the situation
of slaves, is strictly true, and will refute at the same time all the
arguments which have hitherto been, and may yet be brought by the
_receivers_, to prove that their treatment is humane. In one of the
western colonies of the Europeans, [107]six hundred and fifty thousand
slaves were imported within an hundred years; at the expiration of which
time, their whole posterity were found to amount to one hundred and
forty thousand. This fact will ascertain the treatment of itself. For
how shamefully must these unfortunate people have been oppressed? What a
dreadful havock must famine, fatigue, and cruelty, have made among them,
when we consider, that the descendants of _six hundred and fifty
thousand_ people in the prime of life, gradually imported within a
century, are less numerous than those, which only _ten thousand_[108]
would have produced in the same period, under common advantages,
and in a country congenial to their constitutions?

But the _receivers_ have probably great merit on the occasion. Let
us therefore set it down to their humanity. Let us suppose for once,
that this incredible waste of the human species proceeds from a
benevolent design; that, sensible of the miseries of a servile state,
they resolve to wear out, as fast as they possibly can, their
unfortunate slaves, that their miseries may the sooner end, and that a
wretched posterity may be prevented from sharing their parental
condition. Now, whether this is the plan of reasoning which the
_receivers_ adopt, we cannot take upon us to decide; but true it
is, that the effect produced is exactly the same, as if they had
reasoned wholly on this _benevolent_ principle.


       *        *        *        *        *
