By natural transition I am now brought to inquire into the _true character_ of the evil whose history has been traced. Here I shall be brief. Slavery in the Barbary States is denounced as an unquestionable outrage upon humanity and justice. In this judgment nobody hesitates. Our liveliest sympathies attend these white brethren,--torn from homes, the ties of family and friendship rudely severed, parent separated from child and husband from wife, exposed at public sale like cattle, and dependent, like cattle, upon the uncertain will of an arbitrary taskmaster. We read of a "gentleman" compelled to be valet of the barbarian emperor of Morocco;[146] and Calderon, the pride of the Spanish stage, has depicted the miserable fate of a Portuguese prince, degraded by the infidel Moor to carry water in a garden. But the lowly in condition had their unrecorded sorrows, whose sum-total swells to a fearful amount. Who can tell how many hearts have been wrung by the pangs of separation, how many crushed by the comfortless despair of interminable bondage? "Speaking as a Christian," says the good Catholic father who has chronicled much of this misery, "if on the earth there can be any condition which in its character and evils may represent in any manner the dolorous Passion of the Son of God (which exceeded all evils and torments, because by it the Lord suffered every kind of evil and affliction), it is, beyond question and doubt, none other than slavery and captivity in Algiers and Barbary, whose infinite evils, terrible torments, miseries without number, afflictions without mitigation, it is impossible to comprehend in a brief span of time."[147] When we consider the author's character as a father of the Catholic Church, it will be felt that language can no further go. The details of the picture may be seen in the report of another Catholic father at a later day, who furnishes a chapter on the condition of Christian slaves in Morocco. Their torments are depicted: constrained to work at all hours, without days of rest, without proper food; sometimes the diversion of their master, "who makes their labor his rest and their sufferings his pleasure"; subject at all times to his capricious will, and the victims of horrid cruelty. One is described who was cast naked to the dogs, but, amidst the torments he endured, exhorted his fellow-captives to have patience, "telling them that Jesus Christ had suffered much more for them and for him";--saying this, he gathered up his bowels, which he drew from the mouths of the dogs, till, his strength failing him, he expired, and they devoured him. "I should never have done," says the father, "did I go about to relate here all that the merchants and captives told us of cruelties, they are so excessive."[148] [146] Braithwaite's Revolutions in Morocco, p. 233.