Care was taken to degrade them below men, to preserve the right of treating them as brutes.

If some unions furtive, or favoured by cupidity, were formed amongst them, the wife and children belonged to the master.

They were sold separately, without any regard to the ties of nature, all the attachments with which God has formed the chain of human sympathies were rent asunder without commiseration.
This crime _en masse_, this systematic brutality, had its theorists and apologists; human faculties were denied to the blacks.

They were classed as a race between the flesh and the spirit.

Thus the infamous abuse of power, which was exercised over this inert and servile race, was called necessary guardianship.