Enslave my tribes! what, half mankind imban, Then read, expound, enforce the rights of man! Prove plain and clear how nature's hand of old Cast all men equal in her human mould! Their fibres, feelings, reasoning powers the same, Like wants await them, like desires inflame. Thro former times with learned book they tread, Revise past ages and rejudge the dead, Write, speak, avenge, for ancient sufferings feel, Impale each tyrant on their pens of steel, Declare how freemen can a world create, And slaves and masters ruin every state.-- Enslave my tribes! and think, with dumb disdain, To scape this arm and prove my vengeance vain! But look! methinks beneath my foot I ken A few chain'd things that seem no longer men; Thy sons perchance! whom Barbary's coast can tell The sweets of that loved scourge they wield so well. Link'd in a line, beneath the driver's goad, See how they stagger with their lifted load; The shoulder'd rock, just wrencht from off my hill And wet with drops their straining orbs distil, Galls, grinds them sore, along the rarnpart led, And the chain clanking counts the steps they tread.
By night close bolted in the bagnio's gloom, Think how they ponder on their dreadful doom, Recal the tender sire, the weeping bride, The home, far sunder'd by a waste of tide, Brood all the ties that once endear'd them there, But now, strung stronger, edge their keen despair. Till here a fouler fiend arrests their pace: Plague, with his burning breath and bloated face, With saffron eyes that thro the dungeon shine, And the black tumors bursting from the groin, Stalks o'er the slave; who, cowering on the sod, Shrinks from the Demon and invokes his God, Sucks hot contagion with his quivering breath, And, rack'd with rending torture, sinks in death.
Nor shall these pangs atone the nation's crime; Far heavier vengeance, in the march of time, Attends them still; if still they dare debase And hold inthrall'd the millions of my race; A vengeance that shall shake the world's deep frame, That heaven abhors, and hell might shrink to name. Nature, long outraged, delves the crusted sphere, And moulds the mining mischief dark and drear; Europa too the penal shock shall find, The rude soul-selling monsters of mankind: