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his sustenance, we are guilty in the court of the just conscience of starving him. I have known in one of the West-India islands, I have been a witness in person to the fact, where masters have allowed their slaves no food whatever, but have only excused them from the work of a day or two in the course of the week to provide themselves food. In some of the West-India islands they allow no more than six or eight pints of horse-beans to each negro-man or woman for a week. Will the physicians say that this is food sufficient to support a hard-working and robust person? A healthy negro might eat the week's allowance in two days.

John Philmore, in his admirable "Dialogues on the Man-trade," says, "Taking all the slaves together, that are brought on board on our ships yearly from the coast of Africa, where they are bought by our Guinea merchants, I think one may venture to affirm, that at least, a tenth part of them die on the voyage. The merchants are certainly chargeable with taking away a man's life, unjustly, is murder; whether it be done in two or three minutes, or two or three months, that makes no difference. -I do not think it necessary in order to convict a man of murder to make it appear that he had an intention to commit murder: whoever does, by unjust force and violence deprive another of his liberty, and while he has him in his power reduces him to such a condition and gives him such treatment, as evidently endangers his life, and in the event do actually deprive him of his life, is guilty of murder.

"By the account given in the second volume of the complete system of Geography, the number of negroes brought
*These Dialogues were printed in London in the year 1760.
brought away by the English, in the year 1725, appeared to be about fifty thousand. We will suppose that the number of negroes purchased by our Guinea merchants, on year with another, are no more than thirty five thousand: now by the account given by that author, of the negroes in our plantations it is said, that in the island of Jamaica almost half of the new imported negroes die in the seasoning; and, according to the fame account there are twice as many imported into these two islands, as into all our other islands in the West-Indies, and all our colonies in North America. At a moderate computation, therefore, it may be reckoned, that of all those who are purchased by our African merchants in year, twelve thousand die upon the voyage and in the seasoning."

In the West-Indies, the negroes work, from the rising to the setting sun, with but little intermission, and are driven like cattle in herds to their labor by the smack of the whip, some under the pressure of disease, some of the women soon after being delivered, some of these unhappy people tied to a weight of fifty-six pounds by a chain around their necks, some chained together, and some of them without clothes to conceal what decency requires to be concealed. A negro in one of the British West-India islands is said, when perecuted by his master, to have jumped in a fit of despair into a large copper of boiling sugar, as into an asylum from tyranny. There are frequent instances of their destroying themselves from being wearied from oppression. Some masters refuse a permission to their negroes to be instructed in Christianity from the plea that if they were made Christians they would grow proud and unwilling to work. Poor and persecuted sufferers! I have often seen your afflictions with a moistened eye and a breaking heart. It is the duty of all the nations of the world who are engaged in the slave-trade to desist from the iniquitous occupation. It is more particularly