In these cases of systematic management, of daily and almost hourly recurrence, the interposition of a new tribunal of appeal for checking the master’s authority, and compelling him, by the dread of penalties, to be more liberal in his allowances of food and rest, and more abstemious as to labour and punishment; in short, to force him to amend the Slave’s treatment in future in all the undefinable particulars into which it ramifies, or even to compensate to the Slave his past ill usage, would in practice be soon found productive, not only of extreme discontent, insubordination, and commotions on private properties, but of the most fatal consequences to the safety of the whole colony. Sunk as the Slaves at present are, we are assured they do not feel into what a depth they have been depressed. We are told that they are not shocked, as we are for them, by the circumstances of a Negro sale, or by the other degrading particulars of their treatment; the spirit of the man is extinct, or rather dormant within them. But remember, the first return of life after a swoon is commonly a convulsion, dangerous at once to the party himself, and to all around him. Impart to the Slaves the consciousness of personal rights, and the means of asserting them; give the Slaves a power of appealing to the laws; and you awaken in them a sense of the dignity of their nature, you call into life a new set of most dangerous emotions; of emotions, let me repeat it, beyond measure dangerous, while you continue the humiliating and ignominious distinctions to which they now unconsciously submit. When you encourage your Slave to take account of his rights, and measure them with his enjoyments: when you thus teach him to reflect on the treatment he is receiving; to compare his own condition with that of Slaves under other masters; to deliberate about obtaining redress; and, at last, to resolve to seek it: when you thus accustom him to think, and feel, and decide, and act; to be conscious of a wrong; to resent an injury; to go and relate the story of his ill usage, thus daring to harbour the idea of bringing his master to punishment and shame: when you even enable him to achieve this victory; Do you think that he will long endure the wrongs he now tolerates? It is a remark, if I mistake not, of an ancient historian, who had the power above all others of placing before his reader the scene he represents, that in that celebrated instance in which a whole army, being hemmed in on all sides by the enemy, was compelled, according to the barbarous practice of ancient warfare, to submit to the shameful condition of going under a sort of gallows, that each man was rendered most sensible of his own dishonour, by seeing the shameful appearance of his comrades in that disgraceful exhibition. And can you think that, when affection combines with indignation, a Negro will bear to see the wife of his bosom, or a mother the children of her