Beagle of the funny pages
Yet these low, insignificant coral-islets stand and are victorious: for here another power, as an antagonist, takes part in the contest.
“It is impossible to behold these waves without feeling a conviction that an island, though built of the hardest rock, let it be porphyry, granite, or quartz, would ultimately yield and be demolished by such an irresistible power. Those who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children - those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own - being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.”
“It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the state of slaves with our poorer countrymen: if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin but how this bears on slavery, I cannot see as well might the use of the thumb-screw be defended in one land, by showing that men in another land suffered from some dreadful disease.