596 THE AFKICAN PHYSICALLY. Chap. XXIX. 



greater loser of the two. Then the presence of millions of a 

 degraded race makes amalgamation or transportation im- 

 possible ; there they must remain ; if they cannot be elevated, 

 they must prove a down-drag, a moral millstone on the 

 neck, an evil beyond remedy ; a severe retribution on 

 the descendants of those who were goaded on by our own 

 forefathers in the slave-trade. But we do not believe in any 

 incapacity of the African in either mind or heart ; and our 

 American brethren deserve our warmest sympathy in the 

 gigantic task before them. From the evils connected with 

 the slave-trade our statesmen have nobly striven to rescue 

 and defend us ; and -no reasonable expense, that preserves us 

 from contamination, should be esteemed a sacrifice : if we 

 escape, it is not because, as a nation, we are innocent. 



In reference to the status of the Africans among the 

 nations of the earth, we have seen nothing to justify the 

 notion that they are of a different " breed " or " species " from 

 the most civilized. The African is a man with every attri- 

 bute of human kind. Centuries of barbarism have had the 

 same deteriorating effects on Africans, as Pritchard describes 

 them to have had on certain of the Irish who were driven, 

 some generations back, to the hills in Ulster and Connaught. 

 And these depressing influences have had such moral and 

 physical effects on some tribes, that ages probably will be 

 required to undo what ages have done. This degradation, 

 however, would hardly be given as a reason for holding any 

 Tace in bondage, unless the advocate had sunk morally to the 

 same low state. Apart from the frightful loss of life in the 

 process by which, it is pretended, the negroes are better pro- 

 vided for than in a state of liberty in their own country, it 

 is this very system that perpetuates, if not causes, the un- 

 happy condition with which the comparative comfort of some 

 of them in slavery is contrasted. 



Ethnologists reckon the African as by no means the lowest 

 of the human family. He is nearly as strong physically as 



