[from "Female Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves Album, 1828"]
Whene'er to Afric's shores I turn my eyes,
Horrors of deepest, deadliest guilt arise:
I see, by more than Fancy's mirror shown,
The burning villages and the blazing town:*
See the dire victim torn from social life,
The shrieking babe, the agonizing wife!
She! wretch forlorn, is dragg'd by hostile hands
To distant tyrants, sold to distant lands:
Transmitted miseries, and successive chains,
The sole sad heritage her child obtains!
E'en this last wretched boon their foes deny
To live together, or together die.
By felon hands, by one relentless stroke,
See the fond links of feeling nature broke!
The fibres twisting round a parent's heart,
Torn from their grasp, and bleeding as they part.
HANNAH MORE.
*He hardly durst trust himself to tell the story. "The barbarians, finding the child was an incumberance, threw it into the burning hut from which its mother had retreated." Never said the narrator, "did I witness such anguish as that which the mother expressed - never did I think that human nature could inflict such suffering on a fellow creature."
"The slaver population of Port Louis, in the year 1818, had been returned 11,000. An officer whose duty it was to keep a register of slaves, returned, in 6 years, 6548 - rather more than half the whole number."
See debates on the Mauritius Slave Trade, given in the Times Newspaper, May 10 1826.
Is it not by the Consumers of Slave produced that all this misery is perpetuated? To them are all the horrors of that accursed system ultimately traceable. Let the Consumer remember, that he is the real Slaver owner; that it is for him, and y him that the system is kept at work: - this it is out of his purse that the wages of Men-stealers, Slave Merchants, Planters, and Drivers are paid. Let the consumer, withdraw his support, and Slavery must fall.
--
HUDSON, PRINTER, BIRMINGHAM
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