Indian estate, but he had given up the position because his conscience would not allow him to have anything to do with the system of slavery, and he had come home to devote his time, his abilities, and his earnestness to the generous task of rousing up his countrymen to a full sense of the horrors which were inseparable from the system. He was able to supply men like Brougham, like Fowell Buxton, and like Whitbread with practical facts beyond dispute to establish the realities of slavery in the West Indian colonies. Among the more obvious, although not perhaps even the most odious, accompaniments of the system were the frightful cruelties practised on the slaves, the flogging, the mutilation, and the branding of men, women, and children which formed part of the ordinary conditions of a plantation worked by slave labor. Over and over again it had been denied by men who professed to know all about the subject and to be authorities upon it that any such cruelties were practised on a well-regulated plantation belonging to a {191} civilized owner. It was constantly argued, with self-complacency, that the planter's own interests would not allow him thus to mar the efficiency of the human animals who had to do his work, and that even if the planter had no pity for them, he was sure to have a wholesome and restraining consideration for the physical value of his own living property. [Sidenote: 1832--The horrors of the slave trade] Zachary Macaulay and the Buxtons, the Wilberforces and the Whitbreads, were able to give innumerable and overwhelming proofs that the system every day was working such evils as any system might be expected to work which left one set of human beings absolutely at the mercy of another set of human beings. Many years after this great controversy had won its complete success for the English colonies, a chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States laid it down as law that a slave had no rights which his owner was bound to respect. Up to the time of which we are now writing, it was certainly assumed, in our West Indian colonies, as a self-evident doctrine, utterly beyond dispute or question, that a slave had no rights which his owner was bound to respect. The band of resolute philanthropists who had taken up the subject in England were able to show that frequent flogging of men and women was a regular part of the day's incidents of every plantation, and that branding was constantly used, not merely as a means of punishment, but also as a means of identification. It was a common practice when a female slave attempted to escape for her owner to have her branded on the breast with red-hot iron as an easy means of proving her identity if she were to succeed for a time in getting out of his reach. Numbers of advertisements were produced in which the owners, seeking through the newspapers for the recovery of some of their women slaves, proclaimed the important fact that the fugitive women were