According to Clarkson's estimate, about two and a half out of a hundred of human beings die annually, in the ordinary course of nature, including infants and the aged; but in an African voyage, where few babes and no old people are admitted, so that those shipped are at the firmest period of life, the annual mortality is forty-three in a hundred. In vessels that sail from Bonny, Benin, and the Calabars, whence a large proportion of slaves are brought, this mortality is so much increased by various causes, that eighty-six in a hundred die yearly. He adds, "It is a destruction, which if general but for ten years, would depopulate the world, and extinguish the human race."
We next come to the influence of this diabolical system on the _slave-owner_; and here I shall be cautioned that I am treading on delicate ground, because our own countrymen are slaveholders. But I am yet to learn that wickedness is any the better for being our own. Let the truth be spoken--and let those abide its presence who can.
The following is the testimony of Jefferson, who had good opportunities for observation, and who certainly had no New-England prejudices: "There must, doubtless, be an unhappy influence on the manners of the people, produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. The parent storms; the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in a circle of smaller slaves, gives loose to the worst of passions; and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy, who can retain his morals and manners undepraved in such circumstances."
In a community where all the labor is done by one class there must of course be another class who live in indolence; and we all know how much people that have nothing to do are tempted by what the world calls pleasures; the result is, that slaveholding states and colonies are proverbial for dissipation. Hence, too, the contempt for industry, which prevails in such a state of society.--Where none work but slaves, usefulness becomes degradation. The wife of a respectable mechanic, who accompanied her husband from Massachusetts to the South, gave great offence to her new neighbors by performing her usual household avocations; they begged her to desist from it, (offering the services of their own blacks,) because the sight of a white person engaged in any labor was extremely injurious to the slaves; they deemed it very important that the negroes should be taught, both by precept and example, that they alone were made to work!