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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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their intellects, darken their minds, debase their moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relation- ship to mankind; and yet how wonderfully they have sustained the mighty load of a most frightful bond- age, under which they have been groaning for cen- turies! 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 mighti- est 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.~ An American sailor, who was cast away on the shore of Africa, where he was kept in slavery for three years, was, at the expiration of that period, found to be imbruted and stultified--he had lost all reasoning power; and having forgotten his native language, could only ut- ter some savage gibberish between Arabic and Eng- lish, which nobody could understand, and which even he himself found difficulty in pronouncing. So much for the humanizing influence of THE DOMESTIC INSTITUTION!" Admitting this to have been an ex- traordinary case of mental deterioration, it proves at least that the white slave can sink as low in the scale of humanity as the black one. Mr. DOUGLASS has very properly chosen to write his own Narrative, in his own style, and according to the best of his ability, rather than to employ some one else. It is, therefore, entirely his own produc- tion; and, considering how long and dark was the ca- reer he had to run as a slave,--how few have been his opportunities to improve his mind since he broke his iron fetters,--it is, in my judgment, highly creditable to his head and heart. He who can peruse it without a tearful eye, a heaving breast, an afflicted spirit,-- without being filled with an unutterable abhorrence of slavery and all its abettors, and animated with a determination to seek the immediate overthrow of |
