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should be destroyed , and the Antilles be made pasture grounds . It would be better that we should exist without sugar , than that we should consume it at the cost of the torture of our fellows . It would be better to put all those dependent upon slaves for their subsistence on the pension list for the remainder of their
existence , rather than the slavery should continue , rather than such diabolical atrocities should be permitted , as have been recorded by Henry Whiteley * and numerous other persons . The blood runs cold while reading them , the muscles involuntarily contract , and the hand grips as on the hilt of a weapon , to strike the oppressors dead , and thus decide for ever the question of
' property . ' The wonder , the most unaccountable wonder is the patience wherewith the slaves submit to their callous oppressors ; nay more , that black hands should be the wielders of the ' cartwhip / to inflict cruelty upon fellow-blacks . How brutalizing must be the influence which can thus thoroughly destroy the power of reflection , the power of perceiving that if the blacks
were simultaneously to refuse to flay their brethren , flogging must altogether cease , inasmuch as the whites would not be sufficiently numerous even to perform the labour . The mere folding of the arms in passive inaction would be sufficient , yet have not the blacks sufficient energy to bring it to pass . Henry Whiteley , who
seems to be a humane man , and whose statements bear internal evidence of their truth , notices a remarkable fact , the gradual hardening of the heart which takes place even in humane people , after becoming familiarized to scenes of cruelty . He describes an overseer , a generally humane man , who
* stood by and witnessed the whole of this cruel operation ( flogging young women with a cart-whip on the naked flesh ) with as much seeming indifference , as if he had been paying them their wages . I was meanwhile perfectly unmanned by mingled horror and pity / This was in Jamaica . Further on Henry Whitely says ,
* After a few weeks , although my moral abhorrence of slavery continued to increase , my sensibility to the sight of physical suffering was so greatly abated , that a common flogging no longer affected me to the painful degree that I at first experienced . ' Here then is an argument which might at once weigh even with the selfishness of the whites , against the continuance of slavery ,
even were there no other argument to adduce . The moral beauty of the character of the white himself is destroyed . He calls himself a Christian , and he goes through a course of self-degradation for the sake of gain , which reduces him from the condition of civilized humanity to that of a ferocious savage . And for the sake of protecting our commerce and our shipping , is this system of iniquity upheld 1 Verily , it is marvellous , that in the nineteenth
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450 On the Ministerial Plan for the
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* ' Three Month * in Jamaica , in 1832 . '
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1833, page 460, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2618/page/20/
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