The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I
General
The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I
Literature -- Collections
Perhaps, too, a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus,
which a late ingenious experimentalist has discovered to be the
principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled them from
extricating, in the act of inspiration, so much of that fluid from the
outer air, or obliged them in expiration to part with more of it. They
seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labor through the day,
will be induced by the slightest amusement to sit up till midnight, or
later, tho knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning.
They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome.
But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which
prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they
do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites.
They are more ardent after their female; but love seems with them to
be more an eager desire than a tender, delicate mixture of sentiment
and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless
afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to
us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with
them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of
sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition
to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in
labor. An animal, whose body is at rest and who does not reflect, must
be disposed to sleep, of course. Comparing them by their faculties of
memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they
are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could
scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the
investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull,
tasteless, and anomalous.
It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation. We
will consider them here, on the same stage with the whites, and where
the facts are not apocryphal on which a judgment is to be formed. It
will be right to make great allowances for the difference of
condition, of education, of conversation, of the sphere in which they
move. Many millions of them have been brought to, and born in America.
Most of them, indeed, have been confined to tillage, to their own
homes, and their own society; yet many have been so situated that they
might have availed themselves of the conversation of their masters;
many have been brought up to the handicraft arts, and from that
circumstance have always been associated with the white. Some have
been liberally educated, and all have lived in countries where the
arts and sciences are cultivated to a considerable degree, and have
had before their eyes samples of the best works from abroad.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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