A considerate young person, who was lately in one of our _West-India_ Islands, where he observed the miserable situation of the Negroes, makes the following remarks: ‘I meet with daily exercise, to see the treatment which these miserable wretches meet with from their masters, with but few exceptions. They whip them most unmercifully, on small occasions; they beat them with thick Clubs, and you will see their Bodies all whaled and scarred: in short, they seem to set no other value on their lives than as they cost them so much money; and are not retrained from killing them, when angry, by a worthier consideration than that they lose so much. They act as though they did not look upon them as a race of human creatures, who have reason, and remembrance of misfortunes; but as beasts, like oxen, who are stubborn, hardy and senseless, fit for burdens, and designed to bear them. They will not allow them to have any claim to human privileges, or scarce, indeed, to be regarded as the work of God. Though it was consistent with the justice of our Maker to pronounce the sentence on our common parent, and through him on all succeeding generations, _That he and they should eat their bread by the sweat of their brow_; yet does it not stand recorded by the same Eternal Truth, _That the Labourer is worthy of his Hire_? It cannot be allowed in natural justice, that there should be a servitude without condition: A cruel endless servitude. It cannot be reconcileable to natural justice, that whole nations, nay, whole continents of men, should be devoted to do the drudgery of life for others, be dragged away from their attachments of relations and societies, and made to serve the appetites and pleasures of a race of men, whose superiority has been obtained by an illegal force.’