_Silence, you villanous woman! if you would not
Have your head pay for what your tongue has done._[151]
[151] This translation is borrowed from Sismondi's Literature
of the South of Europe, by Roscoe, Vol. III. p. 381. There is a
letter of John Dunton, Mariner, addressed to the English Admiralty
in 1637, which might furnish the foundation of a similar scene.
"For my only son," he says, "is now a slave in Algier, and but
ten years of age, and like to be lost forever, without God's
great mercy and the king's clemency, which, I hope, may be in
some manner obtained."--A True Journal of the Sallee Fleet, with
the Proceedings of the Voyage, published by John Dunton, London
Mariner, Master of the Admiral, called the Leopard: Osborne's
Voyages, Vol. II. p. 492.
From such a scene we gladly turn away, while, in the sincerity of our
hearts, we give our sympathies to the unhappy sufferers. Fain would we
avert their fate; fain would we destroy the system of bondage that has
made them wretched and their masters cruel. And yet we must not judge
with harshness the Algerine slave-owner, who, reared in a religion of
slavery, learned to regard Christians "guilty of a skin not colored
like his own" as lawful prey, and found sanctions for his conduct
in the injunctions of the Koran, the custom of his country, and the
instinctive dictates of an imagined self-interest. It is, then, the
"peculiar institution" which we are aroused to execrate, rather than
the Algerine slave-masters glorying in its influence, nor perceiving
their foul disfigurement.