A head whisked off, brains dashed out, or some other
short form of savage dispatch, is the preferential method of
destruction. With our author's better masters, there was the long,
dreary vicissitude, beginning from the horrors of the capture, and
ending perhaps years upon years after, in some bush or under the lash
of the driver. The intermediate stages of the starvation life of
hunger, chains, and hideous exposure at the barancoon, the stowing
away like herrings on board the noisome ship, the suffocation, the
deck-sores wrought into the body by the attrition of the bonier parts
of the system against the unyielding wood--all these, says Mr.
Froude, were more tolerable than the swift doing away with life under
an African master! Under such, at all events, the care and comfort
suitable to age were strictly provided for, and cheered the advanced
years of the faithful bondsman.
After a good deal of talk, having the same logical value, our author,
in his enthusiasm for [172] slavery, delivers himself thus: "For
myself, I would rather be the slave of a Shakespeare or a Burghley,
than the slave of a majority in the House of Commons, or the slave of
my own folly.
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