This is the grand plea, upon which our West Indian planters have founded their right to the perpetual services of their _Creole_ slaves. They consider them as the young or offspring of cattle. But as the slaves in question have been proved, and are now acknowledged, to be the offspring of men and women, of social, intellectual, and accountable beings, their right must fall to the ground. Nor do I know upon what other principle or right they can support it. They can have surely no _natural right_ to the infant, who is born of a woman slave. If there be any right to it by _nature_, such right must belong, not to the master of the mother, but to the mother herself. They can have no right to it again, either on the score of _reason_ or of _justice_. Debt and crime have been generally admitted to be two fair grounds, on which men may be justly deprived of their liberty for a time, and even made to labour, inasmuch as they include _reparation of injury_, and the duty of the magistrate to _make examples_, in order that he may not bear the sword in vain. But what injury had the infant done, when it came into the world, to the master of its mother, that reparation should be sought for, or punishment inflicted for example, and that this reparation and this punishment should be made to consist of a course of action and suffering, against which, more than against any other, human nature would revolt? Is it reasonable, is it just, that a poor infant who has done no injury to any one, should be subjected, _he and his posterity for ever_, to _the arbitrary will and tyranny of another_, and moreover to _the condition of a brute_, because by _mere accident_, and by _no fault_ or _will of his own_, he was born of a person, who had been previously in the condition of a slave?