262 TIMEHRI. 
—— 
of our own colour to the grade of beasts, and it is equally 
ridiculous to suppose that to the negro, whose only 
pleasures are the gratifications of his natural appetites, 
and whose only pains or cares arise from the mortifications 
or denial of those appetites, that the same arguments 
would avail as those we should use to an enlightened 
European. Ignorance and barbarism, in all nations and 
colours, are alike the parents of violence—tyranny on the 
one hand and slavery on the other—and till the impulse 
of nature is brought under subje€tion to the laws of 
society, and the strong kand of Government reduces the 
violence of the individual to the bounds of common jus- 
tice, so long will the wiser be the masters and the 
ignorant be slaves, and so long will coercion be the only 
pledge of obedience, and all the vices we have enumer- 
ated be characteristic of the state of slavery. | 
_The creole negroes of the West Indies owe their superi- 
ority over the Africans to their being bred up in society, 
with the laws constantly operating before their eyes, 
and they are the more content with their situation by 
seeing that those laws are to them a sure proteétion 
from violence, in faét they begin to have some idea of 
the policy of good behaviour as it operates on their gen- 
eral state of comfort, and they comprehend the use of 
that self-denial without which the African is either out- 
rageous or melancholy. This is their dawning of politi- 
cal reason, and it would be highly dangerous to force the 
light upon them further than nature calculates them to 
bear it. To theorists it should therefore be said, time 
will accomplish all you wish, and the change will then, 
and ought to be, so gradual that the chain of society 
will still continue perfeét, and need fear none of those 
Oe 
