Thus from every quarter are we conducted to the same conclusion.
And all this cumulative and unimpeachable testimony is reinforced by testimony of an earlier day, also from South Carolina. The Assembly of the Colony represented to the King, in 1734, that they were
"Subject to many intestine dangers from the great number of negroes that are now among us."[124]
Another representation shortly afterwards declared:—
"If any stop be put to the exportation of rice from South Carolina to Europe, it ... may render the whole Colony an easy prey to their neighbors, the Indians and Spaniards, and also to those yet more dangerous enemies, their own negroes, who are ready to revolt on the first opportunity, and are eight times as many in number as there are white men able to bear arms."[125]
Thus was it before, as during the Revolution,—weakness always, nothing but weakness.
And this is precisely according to human experience. It was in South Carolina as it had been in other lands where Slavery prevailed. Here I read the testimony of a remarkable writer, Archbishop Whately.
"For if there be any one truth which the deductions of reason alone, independent of history, would lead us to anticipate, and which again history alone would establish independently of antecedent reasoning, it is this: that a whole class of men placed permanently under the ascendency of another as subjects, without the rights of citizens, must be a source, at the best, of weakness, and generally of danger, to the State.... It is notorious, accordingly, how much Sparta was weakened and endangered by the Helots, always ready to avail themselves of any public disaster as an occasion for revolt."[126]
The Archbishop then recalls how Hannibal for sixteen years maintained himself in Italy against the Romans, and, though scantily supplied from Carthage, recruited his ranks by the aid of Roman subjects. Truly does he say that every page of history teaches the same lesson, and proclaims in every different form, "How long shall these men be a snare unto us?"[127]—and also, "The remnant of these nations which thou shalt not drive out shall be pricks in thine eyes and thorns in thy side."[128]