Include also the effects of forced labor, which reduced
the average duration of a slave's life to fifteen years, and carried
off yearly one-fifteenth of the whole number, and the reason for the
slaver's profits and for his unscrupulous activity become clear.
Out of the sugar, thus clarified with blood, the glittering frosted-work
of colonial splendor rose. A few great planters debauched the
housekeeping of the whole island. Beneath were debts, distrust,
shiftlessness, the rapacity of imported officials, the discontent
of resident planters with the customs of the mother-country, the
indifference of absentees, the cruel rage for making the most and the
best sugar in the world, regardless of the costly lives which the mills
caught and crushed out with the canes. Truly, it was sweet as honey in
the mouth, and suddenly became bitter as wormwood in the belly.
Let us glance at the people who were thus violently torn from the
climate, habits, diet, and customs which created their natural and
congenial soil, from their mother-tongues, their native loves and
hatreds, from the insignificant, half-barbarous life, which certainly
poisoned not the life-blood of a single Christian, though it sweetened
not his tea. What bitterness has crept into the great heart of Mr.
Carlyle, which beats to shatter the affectations and hypocrisies of
a generation, and to summon a civilized world to the worship of
righteousness and truth! Is this a Guinea trader or a prophet who is
angry when Quashee prefers his pumpkins and millet, reared without the
hot guano of the lash, and who will not accept the reduction of a bale
of cotton or a tierce of sugar, though Church and State be disinfected
of slavery?[E] It is a drop of planter's gall which the sham-hater
shakes testily from his corroded pen.
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