The maintenance of civil liberty is therefore absolutely necessary to prevent an increase of our national guilt, by the addition of the horrid crime of tyranny.—­Notwithstanding that the plea of necessity cannot here be urged, yet this is no reason why an increase of the practice is not to be feared.

Our North American colonies afford us a melancholy instance to the contrary; for though the climate in general is so wholesome and temperate, that it will not authorise this plea of necessity for the employment of slaves, any more than our own, yet the pernicious practice of slave-holding is become almost general in those parts.  At New-York, for instance, the infringement on civil or domestic liberty is become notorious, notwithstanding the political controversies of the inhabitants in praise of liberty; but no panegyric on this subject (howsoever elegant in itself) can be graceful or edifying from the mouth or pen of one of those provincials, because men who do not scruple to detain others in slavery, have but a very partial and unjust claim to the protection of the laws of liberty; and indeed it too plainly appears that they have no real regard for liberty, farther than their own private interests are concerned; and (consequently) that they have so little detestation of despotism and tyranny, that they do not scruple to exercise them whenever their caprice excites them, or their private interest seems to require an exertion of their power over their miserable slaves.

Every petty planter, who avails himself of the service of slaves, is an arbitrary monarch, or rather a lawless Bashaw in his own territories, notwithstanding that the imaginary freedom of the province wherein he resides, may seem to forbid the observation.

The boasted liberty of our American colonies, therefore, has so little right to that sacred name, that it seems to differ from the arbitrary power of despotic monarchs only in one circumstance, viz. that it is a many-headed monster of tyranny, which entirely subverts our most excellent constitution; because liberty and slavery are so opposite to each other, that they cannot subsist in the same community. “Political liberty (in mild or well regulated governments) makes civil liberty valuable; and whosoever is deprived of the latter, is deprived also of the former.”  This observation of the learned Montesquieu, I hope sufficiently justifies my censure of the Americans for their notorious violation of civil liberty;—­The New-York Journal, or, The General Advertiser, for Thursday, 22d October, 1767, gives notice by advertisement, of no less than eight different persons who have escaped from slavery, or are put up to public sale for that horrid purpose.

That I may demonstrate the indecency of such proceedings in a free country, I shall take the liberty of laying some of these advertisements before my readers, by way of example.