We continued it even yet, in spite of all our great
pretensions. We were once as obscure among the nations of the earth, as
savage in our manners, as debased in our morals, as degraded in our
understandings, as these unhappy Africans. But in the lapse of a long
series of years, by a progression slow, and for a time almost
imperceptible, we had become rich in a variety of acquirements. We were
favoured above measure in the gifts of Providence, we were unrivalled in
commerce, preeminent in arts, foremost in the pursuits of philosophy and
science, and established in all the blessings of civil society: we were in
the possession of peace, of liberty, and of happiness: we were under the
guidance of a mild and a beneficent religion; and we were protected by
impartial laws, and the purest administration of justice: we were living
under a system of government, which our own happy experience led us to
pronounce the best and wisest, and which had become the admiration of the
world. From all these blessings we must for ever have been excluded, had
there been any truth in those principles, which some had not hesitated to
lay down as applicable to the case of Africa; and we should have been at
this moment little superior, either in morals, knowledge, or refinement, to
the rude inhabitants of that continent.
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