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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It may therefore be boldly affirmed, that the interior, to which may be added the western coast of Africa to the south of the great desert, never enjoyed any of that intercourse with more polished nations, without which no nation on earth is known ever to have attained to any high degree of civilization; and that, contemptuously as we and the other civilized nations of Europe now speak of the Africans, had we been left in their situation, we should probably have been not more civilized than themselves.

Let the case be put, that the interior of Africa had been made by the Almighty the cradle of the world—that issuing thence, instead of from the north-western part of Asia, the several streams of nations had pervaded and settled the whole of that extensive continent—that the banks of the Niger, not less fertile than those of the Euphrates or the Nile, had been the seat of the first great empire—that the kingdoms of Tombuctoo and Houssa had been the Assyria and Egypt of Africa, and that the arts and sciences had been communicated to a cluster of little independent states, and, under the same favourable circumstances, had been carried to the same heights of excellence as that which they attained in European Greece—that these had been however in their turn swallowed up, together with the whole of that vast continent, by the arms of a single nation, the Romans of Africa, under the shelter of whose established dominion the various nations throughout that spacious extent, enjoying the blessings of civil order and security, the natural consequence had followed, that in every quarter the arts and sciences had sprung up and flourished—Might not our northern countries have been then in the same state of comparative barbarism in which Africa now lies? Might not some African philosopher, proud of his superior accomplishments, have made it a question, whether those wretched whites, the very outcasts of nature, who were banished to the cold regions of the north, were capable of civilization? And thus, might not a Slave Trade in Europeans, aye, in Britons, have then been justified by those sable reasoners, on precisely the same grounds as those on which the African Slave Trade is now supported?