Is it not pathetic? Could slavery ever strike a deeper bottom than that? Standing before his owner, the Asiatic, of his own choice, hands himself over to be degraded, to be placed in chains and delivered up to the torments of hell forever. I despair of man. I would cry my heart out if I permitted myself to dwell upon the folly and stupidity and slavery of which man voluntarily makes himself the victim. Think of it! A man and a woman, nobody knows where or when, are supposed to have tasted of the fruit of a tree; the Oriental mind, with its crouching imagination, pounces upon this flimsy, fanciful tale with the appetite of a carrion crow, and exalts it to the dignity of an excuse for the eternal damnation of a whole world. I am dazed! I can say no more! Let us recapitulate. The Oriental distrust of the natural man, born of self-depreciation, which is the fruit of prolonged slavery, develops into a sort of mental canker spreading at a raging pace until the whole universe, with its glorious sun and stars, becomes an object of horror and loathing. Not satisfied with thinking of himself as a worm, of his intellectual and moral nature as totally depraved, he communicates his disease to the world in which he lives until it, too, shrinks and wastes away. Then the disease, finding no more on this side of the grave to feed upon, leaps over the grave and converts the beyond, the virgin worlds, into an _inferno_ with which to satiate its fear. Indeed frightful are the thoughts of a slave people!