Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land, 1830-1840 - Page 253
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[Page 253]
Now, will any one in his senses believe that ill-treated slaves would voluntarily return and seek masters who had ill-treated oppressed them in the manner described in some of the publications of the day. Nay those very slaves could have positively claimed their freedom, precisely on the same principle that the judges of England unanimously declared that when a slave arrived in England with his master he was instantly free. The slaves spoken of were not even under immediate control or of their masters, they had been from the jurisdiction of the Authority of Bermuda, and could not again by law be made slaves.
Slavery has been, and must be, a curse to the human race, but I do not think it fair and just of our modern on the part of some of the moderns who really possess, or affect to possess, more humanity than others to fix a stain on contemporaries when slavery is the growth of the former ages of the world, and has continued up until