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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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“How in the world can the two things be compared?” said Miss Ophelia. “The English laborer is not sold, traded, parted from his family, whipped.” “He is as much at the will of his employer as if he were sold to him. The slave-owner can whip his refractory slave to death,- the capitalist can starve him to death. As to family security, it is hard to say which is the worst,- to have one’s children sold, or see them starve to death at home.” “But it’s no kind of apology for slavery, to prove that it isn’t worse than some other bad thing.” “I didn’t give it for one,- nay, I’ll say, besides, that ours is the more bold and palpable infringement of human rights; actually buying a man up, like a horse,- looking at his teeth, cracking his joints, and trying his paces, and then paying down for him having speculators, breeders, traders, and brokers in human bodies and souls,- sets the thing before the eyes of the civilized world in a more tangible form, though the thing done be, after all, in its nature, the same; that is, appropriat- ing one set of human beings to the use and improvement of another, without any regard to their own.” “I never thought of the matter in this light,” said Miss Ophelia. “Well, I’ve travelled in England some, and I’ve looked over a good many documents as to the state of their lower classes; and I really think there is no deny- ing Alfred, when he says that his slaves are better off than a large class of the population of England. You see, you must not infer, from what I have told you, |
