Year in and year out...

Year in and year out, they were set ashore diseased or whole, resigned or despairing and were lost forever to the land of their birth... The uses of servitude, like its abuses, never change; they were the same all the world over and from one age to another. In America and the West Indies, as in ancient Rome, or in Greece or the dim beginnings of history, slavery was divided into two broad types - domestic slavery and the slavery of the works and plantations.

” [^2] Let us now give some more extracts from the same book Freedom from Fear or the Slave and his Emancipation by O. A. Sherrard, to show how and to what degree the foremost Christian nations of the West meted out the most inhuman treatment to the defenceless Negroes. The reader would also see their debased beliefs and notions about human beings who differed from them in colour and race.

“ From the broad historical outlook, they had passed through two stages: in the first bearing on their shoulders, like a patient Atlas, the glories of many long dead civilizations; and in the second, more wretched than the first, losing even that vicarious honour, and failing to an abject state in which they contributed solely to private greed. Their condition, especially in their second phase, should have scared the conscience of a nominally Christian world, but left it peculiarly unmoved.

The idea of slavery was so deeply ingrained that no one questioned its propriety. All nations either endured or enjoyed it. ” [^3] **“**The lot of plantation slave was really very hard. The job assigned to him was, from his point of view, skilled; he was to cultivate a crop unknown to him - for the most part sugar in the West Indies, cotton or tobacco in America - and, in that his work was novel, he endured a heavier burden than his counterpart in Greece or Rome or among the serfs of Europe..

All was new and strange to him; he had, therefore, to be broken in; he had to be taught his new duties; he had to be seasoned' as the saying was. 'Seasoning' was a euphemism for a harsh discipline, which was reckoned by the opponents of slavery to carry off not less than twenty per cent of those who underwent it. May be that was over the mark, but it must nonetheless be admitted that large numbers died.

The discipline was painful, and there was little to ameliorate and much to embitter its seventy.[^4] The slaves had to pass through terrible stages of suffering. The cumulative effect of all the hardships was disastrous.