“He that is extravagant will quickly become poor, and poverty will
enforce dependence and invite corruption.” * * * “I have avoided that
empyrical morality that cures one vice by the means of another.”
_Johnson’s Rambler._
“If we should admit, what perhaps with more reason may be denied, that
there are certain relations between man and man, which may make slavery
necessary and just, yet it can never be proved, that he, who is suing
for his freedom, ever stood in any of these relations.”
We cannot pretend to know what were the particular facts in relation to
the slavery of the individual then in Scotland. It is not, however,
pretended that the facts in relation to this slave were not the facts in
relation to all others. No suggestion of any illegality as to his
slavery in Jamaica is made, other than the broad ground of the
illegality of slavery itself. This is quite evident from what follows:
“He is certainly subject, by no law but that of violence, to his present
master, who pretends no claim to his obedience, but that he bought him
from a merchant of slaves, whose right to sell him was never examined.”
In the passage under consideration, we are confined wholly to negro
slavery; and had Dr. Johnson been serious in admitting that slavery,
under “certain relations,” was “necessary and just,” he would have
yielded his case; because, then, the slave in hand would have been
placed in the category of proving that he did not exist under these
relations. Johnson well knew that slavery existed in Jamaica by the
sanction of the British Parliament, and he manifests his contempt for
it, by the assertion that the slave was held only by the law of force.
He was, therefore, not reaching for the freedom of that particular
slave, but for the subversion of slavery as a condition of man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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