There is observable among the many a false and bastard sensibility that prompts them to remove those evils and those evils alone, which by hideous spectacle or clamorous outcry are present to their senses, and disturb their selfish enjoyments. Other miseries, though equally certain and far more horrible, they not only do not endeavour to remedy� they support, they fatten on them. Provided the dunghill be not before their parlour window, they are well content to know that it exists, and that it is the hot-bed of their pestilent luxuries. � To this grievous failing we must attribute the frequency of wars, and the continuance of the Slave-trade. The merchant finds no argument against it in his ledger: the citizen at the crowded feast is not nauseated by the stench and filth of the slave-vessel � the fine lady's nerves are not shattered by the shrieks! She sips a beverage sweetened with human blood, even while she is weeping over the refined sorrows of Werter or of Clementina. Sensibility is not Benevolence. Nay, by making us tremblingly alive to trifling misfortunes, it frequently prevents it, and induces effeminate and cowardly selfishness. Our own sorrows, like the Princes of Hell in Milton's Pandemonium, sit enthroned "bulky and vast:" while the miseries of our fellow-creatures dwindle into pigmy forms, and are crowded, an innumerable multitude, into some dark corner of the heart. There is one criterion by which we may always distinguish benevolence from mere sensibility � Benevolence impels to action, and is accompanied by self-denial.
P. S. It has been objected, that if we leave off sugar and rum, why not the other West-India commodities, as cotton and mahogany? To this we answer, First, that if the reasons adduced against the use of sugar and rum be valid and irresistible, and the same reasons apply to cotton and mahogany, why should we not disuse them? Surely no impossibility, no insurmountable inconvenience is implied. The whole objection resolves itself into this � If sugar and rum were the only West India commodities, I could be honest and act like a Christian; but because I like cotton better than linen, and think mahogany genteeler furniture than oak, it is impossible. Secondly, the disuse of sugar and rum only would in a certain number of years prove the adequate means of abolishing the whole of the trade. And there is reason to believe that the additional disuse of cotton, mahogany, &c. would not accelerate the time; for when we might proselyte fifty to the disuse of sugar, we could not perhaps make five persons converts to the disuse of all the West-India commodities. So that what we should gain in point of time by the greater quantity of commodities disused, we should more than lose by the smaller number of persons disusing them. This the very objection makes probable. For they, who start it, do not start it in favour of a severe consistency, but in the hope of keeping themselves in countenance by the multitude of their accomplices. But thirdly, the other West-India commodities do not require such intense labour in their growth and preparation, as the Sugar and Rum. They might be raised by European labourers. The Sugar plantations make Africans necessary, and their slavery intolerable.I have read and heard one argument in favour of the slave-trade, which I mention chiefly on account of its seditious and treasonable tendency. It has been asserted by more than one writer on the subject, that the plantation-slaves are at least as well off as the peasantry in England. Now I appeal to common sense, whether to affirm that the slaves are as well off as our peasantry, be not the same as to assert that our peasantry are as bad off as negro-slaves? And whether if our peasantry believed it, they would not be inclined to rebel?