7939. SLAVERY, Deplorable results of.—
The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous
passions, the most unremitting despotism
on the one part, and degrading submissions on
the other. Our children see this, and learn to
imitate it; for man is an imitative animal.
This quality is the germ of all education in him.
From his cradle to his grave he is learning
to do what he sees others do. If a parent could
find no motive either in his philanthropy or his
self-love, for restraining the intemperance of
passion towards his slave, it should always be
a sufficient one that his child is present. But,
generally, it is not sufficient. The parent
storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments
of wrath, puts on the same airs in the
circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the
worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated,
and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be
stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The
man must be a prodigy who can retain his
manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.
And with what execrations should
the statesman be loaded, who, permitting one-
half the citizens thus to trample on the rights
of the other, transforms those into despots, and
these into enemies, destroys the morals of the
one part, and the amor patriæ of the other. For
if a slave can have a country in this world, it
must be any other in preference to that in
which he is born to live and labor for another;
in which he must lock up the faculties of his
nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual
endeavors to the evanishment of the
human race, or entail his own miserable condition
on the endless generations proceeding
from him.—
Notes on Virginia. Washington ed. viii, 403.
Ford ed., iii, 266.
(1782)
