Now, the impressions we touched upon before
bringing forward the case of the Negro slaves were mainly produced by
pleasurable circumstances. But of a contrary nature and much more
deeply graven are those sentiments which are the outcome of hopeless
terror [198] and pain. For whilst impressions of the former
character glide into the consciousness through accesses no less
normal than agreeable, the infusion of fear by means of bodily
suffering is a process too violent to be forgotten by minds tortured
and strained to unnatural tension thereby. Such tension, oft-
recurrent and scarcely endurable, leaves behind it recollections
which are in themselves a source of sadness. But time, favoured by a
succession of pleasurable experiences, is a sovereign anodyne to
remembrances of this poignant class. No wonder, then, from our
foregoing detail of facts, that whiteness of skin was both redoubted
and tremblingly crouched to by Negroes on whom Europeans had wrought
such unspeakable calamities. Time, however, and the action of
circumstances, especially in countries subject to Catholic dominion,
soon began to modify the conditions under which this sentiment of
terror had been maintained, and, with those conditions, the very
sentiment itself.
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