Let the calumniators of the colored race despise
themselves for their baseness and illiberality of spirit, and henceforth
cease to talk of the natural inferiority of those who require nothing
but time and opportunity to attain to the highest point of human
excellence.
It may, perhaps, be fairly questioned, whether any other portion of the
population of the earth could have endured the privations, sufferings
and horrors of slavery, without having become more degraded in the scale
of humanity than the slaves of African descent. Nothing has been left
undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their
moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind;
and yet how wonderfully they have sustained the mighty load of a most
frightful bondage, under which they have been groaning for centuries! To
illustrate the effect of slavery on the white man,--to show that he has
no powers of endurance, in such a condition, superior to those of
his black brother,--DANIEL O'CONNELL, the distinguished advocate of
universal emancipation, and the mightiest champion of prostrate but not
conquered Ireland, relates the following anecdote in a speech delivered
by him in the Conciliation Hall, Dublin, before the Loyal National
Repeal Association, March 31, 1845. "No matter," said Mr. O'CONNELL,
"under what specious term it may disguise itself, slavery is still
hideous. _It has a natural, an inevitable tendency to brutalize every
noble faculty of man.
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