These effects he attached
to the system of agriculture as followed in our islands. He showed,
besides, how little pains were taken, or how few contrivances were
thought of, to ease the labourers there. He contended that the Africans
ought to be better treated, and to be raised to a better condition; and
he ridiculed the inconsistency of those who held them in bondage. "It
affords," says he, "a curious spectacle to observe that the same people,
who talk in a high strain of political liberty, and who consider the
privilege of imposing their own taxes as one of the unalienable rights
of mankind, should make no scruple of reducing a great proportion of
their fellow-creatures into circumstances by which they are not only
deprived of property, but almost of every species of right. Fortune,
perhaps, never produced a situation more calculated to ridicule a
liberal hypothesis, or to show how little the conduct of men is at the
bottom directed by any philosophical principles." It is a great honour
to the University of Glasgow, that it should have produced, before any
public agitation of this question, three professors[A], all of whom bore
their public testimony against the continuance of the cruel trade.
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