[Sidenote: Assertion, that Negro Slaves are happier than our Peasantry.] But another broad and general objection may be urged against the testimony of the same respectable class of witnesses, that it proves by far too much. For they tell us not only that the Slaves are in general treated with liberality and kindness; not only that they are protected by law equally with white men, in their lives and property; but that they are in a situation superior to that of the bulk of our English peasantry: and one most respectable and amiable man, of whose humanity no one thinks more highly than myself, declared, that they were so happy that he often wished himself one of them. Such assertions as these might excite a smile, if the subject were less serious; but after the review we have taken of the degraded state of this unfortunate class of our fellow creatures, in all its humiliating particulars, we cannot but hear, with the greatest pain, assertions, which, coming from characters so respectable, have but too manifest a tendency to prolong the duration of those enormous evils. The assertions can in themselves be only accounted for by the supposition, that they who made them were utterly ignorant of the particulars of the treatment and estimation of the Negro race. They may have seen, perhaps, the domestic Negroes collected at some season of festivity, and thence have too hastily drawn an inference as to the general situation of the bulk of the Black population; of that far larger class, which daily works under the whip, and is subject to all the other particulars which have been mentioned, of degradation and suffering.