So much may be said for the necessity of employing Africans in the cultivation of rice; but great is the difference between employing negroes in clearing and improving those rich plains, and that miserable state of hardship and slavery to which they are there devoted, and which has been tolerated and established by the law of the land. If we view this race, first ranging over the hills of Africa, equally free and independent as other rude nations on earth, and from thence inveigled by frauds or compelled by force, and then consigned over to a state of endless slavery, we must confess the change is great and deplorable, especially to an impartial and disinterested eye. Without them, it is acknowledged, slow must have been the progress of cultivation in Carolina; but, from such a confederation, what man will presume to vindicate the policy of keeping those rational creatures in perpetual exile and slavery. Nature had given them an equal right to liberty as to life, and the general law of self-preservation was equally concerned for the preservation of both. We would be glad then to know, upon what principle of equity and justice the English traders found their right to deprive the freeborn inhabitants of Africa of their natural liberty and native country; or on what grounds the planter afterwards founds his right to their service during life, and that of all their posterity, to the latest generation. Can the particular laws of any country supersede the general laws of nature? Can the local circumstances of any province upon earth be pled in excuse for such a violent trade, and for such endless slavery in consequence of it? Besides, has not this trade a tendency to encourage war and plunder among the natives of Africa? to set one tribe against another, to catch and trepan their neighbours, on purpose to barter them for European trinkets to the factories? Nor is the traffic confined to the captives of war alone, who have been subjected to slavery by many nations; for so ardently do they covet the pernicious liquors and trifling commodities carried to them from Europe, that, without scruple, they will part with their nearest relations, their wives and children not excepted, to procure them. Thus civilized nations, by such a traffic, have made barbarians more barbarous, and tempted them to commit the most cruel and unnatural actions.