A system of concubinage was practised among them worse than the loose polygamy of the savages: the savage had as many women as consented to become his wives; the colonist as many as he could enslave. There is an ineffaceable stigma upon the Europeans in their intercourse with those whom they treat as inferior races; there is a perpetual contradiction between their lust and their avarice. The planter will one day take a slave for his harlot, and sell her the next as a being of some lower species, a beast of labor. If she be indeed an inferior animal, what shall be said of the one action? If she be equally with himself a human being and an immortal soul, what shall be said of the other? Either way there is a crime committed against human nature.--SOUTHEY, _History of Brazil_, Chap. VIII., Vol. I. p. 258. Negro slavery exists in no part of the world without producing indolence, licentiousness, and inhumanity in the whites; and these vices draw after them their earthly punishment,--to look no farther into their fearful, but assured consequences.--IBID., Chap. XLIV., Vol. III. p. 816. I had observed much, and heard more, of the cruelty of masters towards their negroes; but now I received an authentic account of some horrid instances thereof. The giving a child a slave of its own age to tyrannize over, to beat and abuse out of sport, was, I myself saw, a common practice. Nor is it strange, being thus trained up in cruelty, they should afterwards arrive at so great perfection in it; that Mr. Star, a gentleman I often met at Mr. Lasserre’s, should, as he himself informed L., first nail up a negro by the ears, then order him to be whipped in the severest manner, and then to have scalding water thrown over him, so that the poor creature could not stir for four months after. Another much applauded punishment is drawing their slaves’ teeth. One Colonel LYNCH is universally known to have cut off a poor negro’s legs, and to kill several of them every year by his barbarities.--REV. CHARLES WESLEY, _Journal_, Charleston, S. C., August 2, 1736. You are to have no regard to the health, strength, comfort, natural affections, or moral feelings, or intellectual endowments of my negroes. You are only to consider what subsistence to allow them and what labor to exact of them will subserve my interest. According to the most accurate calculation I can make, the proportion of subsistence and labor which will work them up in six years upon an average is the most profitable to the planter. And this allowance, surely, is very humane; for we estimate here the lives of our coal-heavers, upon an average, at only two years, … and our soldiers and seamen no matter what.--_A West-India Planter’s Instructions for his Overseers_: JOHN ADAMS, _Works_, Vol. X. pp. 339, 340.