SLAVERY. 



239 



slaves which arc imported from other parts of 

 the coast of Africa, arrive in Brazil unbaptized, 

 and before the ceremony of making them 

 Christians can be performed upon them, they 

 must be taught certain prayers, for the acquire- 

 ment of which one year is allowed to the master, 

 before he is obliged to present the slave at the 

 parish-church. This law is not always strictly 

 adhered to as to time, but it is never evaded alto- 

 gether. The religion of the master teaches him 

 that it would be extremely sinful to allow his 

 slave to remain a heathen ; and indeed the 

 Portuguese and Brazilians have too much reli- 

 gious feeling to let them neglect any of the 

 ordinances of their church. The slave himself 

 likewise wishes to be made a Christian, for his 

 fellow-bondmen will in every squabble or trifling 

 disagreement with him, close their string of 

 opprobrious epithets with the name of pagam 

 (pagan). The unbaptized negro feels that he is 

 considered as an inferior being, and although 

 he may not be aware of the value which the 

 whites place upon baptism, still he knows that 



the slaves ran away to the mountains. — Nouveau Voyage, 

 &c. torn. vii. p. 260. 



The St. Domingo planters have paid severely for all their 

 misdeeds, and therefore of them nothing need be said in the 

 present day. The vastness, however, of Brazil, which is a 

 little more vaste than St. Domingo, does not require that the 

 slaves should be marked like cattle. 



