IX.
The reader may perhaps think, that the _receivers_ have by this time expended all their arguments, but their store is not so easily exhausted.

They are well aware that justice, nature, and religion, will continue, as they have ever uniformly done, to oppose their conduct.
This has driven them to exert their ingenuity, and has occasioned that multiplicity of arguments to be found in the present question.
These arguments are of a different complexion from the former.

They consist in comparing the state of _slaves_ with that of some of the classes of _free_ men, and in certain scenes of felicity, which the former are said to enjoy.
It is affirmed that the punishments which the Africans undergo, are less severe than the military; that their life is happier than that of the English peasant; that they have the advantages of manumission; that they have their little spots of ground, their holy-days, their dances; in short, that their life is a scene of festivity and mirth, and that they are much happier in the colonies than in their own country.
These representations, which have been made out with much ingenuity and art, may have had their weight with the unwary; but they will never pass with men of consideration and sense, who are accustomed to estimate the probability of things, before they admit them to be true.

Indeed the bare assertion, that their situation is even comfortable, contains its own refutation, or at least leads us to suspect that the person, who asserted it, has omitted some important considerations in the account.
Such we shall shew to have been actually the case, and that the representations of the _receivers_, when stripped of their glossy ornaments, are but empty declamation.
It is said, first, of _military punishments_, that they are more severe than those which the _Africans_ undergo.

But this is a bare assertion without a proof.