Читать книгу A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Addressed to the freeholders and other inhabitants of Yorkshire онлайн

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“They use neither carriages nor beasts of burthen. They are represented by all authors as the vilest of the human kind, to which they have little more pretension of resemblance than what arises from their exterior form.

“In so vast a continent as that of Africa, and in so great a variety of climates and provinces, we might expect to find a proportionable diversity among the inhabitants, in regard to their qualifications of body and mind; strength, agility, industry, and dexterity, on the one hand; ingenuity, learning, arts and sciences, on the other. But on the contrary, a general uniformity runs through all these various regions of people; so that if any difference be found, it is only in degrees of the same qualities; and, what is more strange, those of the worst kind; it being a common known proverb, that all people on the globe have some good as well as ill qualities, except the Africans. Whatever great personages this country might anciently have produced, and concerning whom we have no information, they are now everywhere degenerated into a brutish, ignorant, idle, crafty, bloody, thievish, mistrustful, and superstitious people, even in those states where we might expect to find them more polished, humane, docile, and industrious.”—“This brutality somewhat diminishes when they are imported young, after they become habituated to clothing, and a regular discipline of life; but many are never reclaimed, and remain savages, in every sense of the word, to their latest period. We find them marked with the same bestial manners, stupidity, and vices, which debase their brethren on the continent, who seem to be distinguished from the rest of mankind, not in person only, but in possessing in the abstract every species of inherent turpitude that is to be found dispersed at large among the rest of the human creation, with scarce a single feature to extenuate this shade of character, differing in this particular from all other men; for in other countries, the most abandoned villain we ever heard of has rarely, if ever, been known unportioned with some one good quality at least in his composition.”—“Among so great a number of provinces on this extensive continent, and among so many millions of people, we have heard but of one or two insignificant tribes, who comprehended any thing of mechanic arts, or manufacture; and even these, for the most part, are said to perform their work in a very bungling and slovenly manner, perhaps not much better than an oran-outang might with a little pains be brought to do.”