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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However the last supposition may mortify our pride, it will appear less monstrous to those who recollect, that not only in ancient times the wisest among the Greeks considered the barbarians, including all the inhabitants of our quarter of the earth, as expressly intended by nature to be their slaves; not only that the Romans regularly sold into slavery all the captives whom they took in the wars, by which on all sides they gradually extended their empire till it was almost commensurate with the then known world; but that our own island long furnished it’s share towards the supply of the Roman market. Even at a later period of our history, we Englishmen have been the subjects of a Slave Trade, for which it is remarkable that the city of Bristol^[11] was the grand emporium. That ancient city has now, I trust for the last time, retired from that guilty commerce.

In fact we know from history, that the great principle, of the demand producing the supply, has been amply verified in this instance, and that when countries in which slavery has been tolerated, have been sufficiently affluent to purchase Slaves, the Slaves have been caught and brought, like other wild animals, from the less civilized regions of the earth, where the inhabitants were less secure against foreign invaders, or against internal violence. Had not our island therefore been conquered by the Romans, who lodged in the soil the seeds of civilization which sprung up afterwards, when circumstances favoured their growth; and had the neighbouring provinces on the continent, from which otherwise the rays of knowledge might have enlightened us, remained also unsubdued; what reason is there to suppose that we, any more than the inhabitants of any other savage country, should now be a civilized nation? than, for instance, the whole continent of America before it was settled by Europeans? than the islands in the Pacific Ocean to this day?