ABSTRACT

WE have been told, Citizen Chairman! by a learned orator, who seems very fond of life, and who has drawn so depraved and contemptible a picture of human nature, that one must almost be ashamed of having lived to witness it, that the love of life must certainly have the strongest influence on the actions of mankind. And to prove this, he tells us a cock and bull story of Caractacus, at Rome; 2 who, when he had lost his liberty, thought it was better to have life and love, with a prospect of regaining his liberty, than to die, and have no prospect at all. He has told also another melancholy tale of a poor tortured slave in the West Indies; not remembering, that if this love of life, or rather, the fear of death, for the distinction is evident, which he is such an advocate for, did not rather restrain than influence the actions of mankind, they would soon, by becoming acquainted with the real nature of that principle I am supporting, learn to strike unanimously for liberty, and slavery and torture would be no more. This poor kidnapped negro, we are told, (for there are pressgangs to make men slaves of labour as well as slaves of war) having had his hands and feet chopped off, by order of his tyrant masters, on account of some seditious attempt to regain his freedom, was afterwards put into a large frying pan over the fire, that he might expiate, by his tortures, that impious love of liberty which he had the audacity to entertain. In the midst of his torments, we are told, that one of his companions, more compassionate than the rest, rushed towards him, and, aiming a blow with his cudgel, would have dashed out his brains, had not the poor mutilated wretch conceived, (such is the curious reasoning that is offered to us by the tame advocates of life without liberty) that the tortures of the frying pan were preferable to instant death, and therefore lifted his poor bleeding stumps, with sudden terror, and broke the force of the blow. Now, if this magnanimous advocate for the frying pan of despotism, had happened to have reflected a little on the physical laws of the animal frame, he would have known that this motion of the arms was merely involuntary, and that neither love, nor fear, nor liberty, nor any other preference of the judgment, had any thing at all to do with it—it being natural to all animals, after they had been long used to perform certain actions in consequence of any particular stimulus, applied either to the sight or any other of the senses, to continue those actions, by mere mechanical impulse, whenever the usual objects are presented, without ever reflecting 45what it is they are doing; just as men of base and abject minds, who have been long used to cringe and tremble at the names of kings and lords, for fear they should be clapped up in bastiles, or turned out of their shops, continue to cringe and tremble, when neither shops nor bastiles happen to be present to their imaginations.