Where there are no longer any profits to corrupt, or fears to
deter, the charm of dominion is broken, and the naked slave, as awake from
a dream, is astonished to find he is free. When the fence is destroyed, the
wilds are open, and the herd breaks loose. The pasture of the cultivated
field is no longer preferred to that of the desert. The sufferer willingly
flies where the extortions of government cannot overtake him; where even
the timid and the servile may recollect they are men; where the tyrant may
threaten, but where he is known to be no more than a fellow creature; where
he can take nothing but life, and even this at the hazard of his own.
Agreeably to this description, the vexations of tyranny have overcome, in
many parts of the East, the desire of settlement. The inhabitants of a
village quit their habitations, and infest the public ways; those of the
valleys fly to the mountains, and, equipt for flight, or possessed of a
strong hold, subsist by depredation, and by the war they make on their
former masters.
These disorders conspire with the impositions of government to render the
remaining settlements still less secure: but while devastation and ruin
appear on every side, mankind are forced anew upon those confederacies,
acquire again that personal confidence and vigour, that social attachment,
that use of arms, which, in former times, rendered a small tribe the seed
of a great nation; and which may again enable the emancipated slave to
begin the career of civil and commercial arts.
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