The Coolie Trade; or, the Excomienda System of the Nineteenth Century [pp. 296-321]

THE COOLIE TRADE.
does it not, in substance, embody the policy of Christendom
toward the weak races, ever since the day of its date to the
present moment?
Thus, then, these facts are beyond dispute, that since the
sixteenth century the civilized world has made a large and
continually increasing demand for the fruits of tropical labors;
that it has been unable to endure, and has never performed
that labor itself; and, finally, that whatever demands it has
made, and at whatever loss of life, or reduction to slavery of the
weaker races, there have always been found agents to supply
them to the fullest extent, in spite of all difficulties and opposition. The world has just as much cotton, and sugar, and
coffee, as it can consume; we have as many shirts, sheets, and
chemises, petticoats, frocks, table-cloths, &c., as we can use;
we cram ourselves with sugar, putting it in coffee, tea, cakes,
tarts, puddings, confectionery, &c.; while coffee is abundant
as water; in short, the farmers of the temperate zones in Europe and America, enjoy as great an abundance of these things,
produced, mostly, at the price of blood (as they know), as they
do of wheat and other provisions raised by the healthful sweat
of their own brows.
Now this inexorable power, this ogre of civilization, which
has gone on for three centuries devouring human beings, and
which gives promise of having a much sharper appetite during
the next three centuries, is entirely ignored by sentimental
philanthropists, and the consequence is that, during the lives
of ten generations of men, we have had nothing in the way
of a vigorous and healthy humanity-a humanity which has
preserved, instead of destroying human life amid tropical labor,
except that displayed by the planters of the Southern United
States, who have been to the negro what Rarey has been to
the horse, and whose humane conduct must of necessity revolutionize the world on this point. It has been the singular
lot of the Southern planters, while managing with admirable
skill' to supply the most rapidly increasing of all the demands
for Southern products, viz.: that for cotton, not only to preserve, but at the same time to foster and increase the suni of
human life. And yet while doing this, and while all other
nations have been destroying the lives of negroes, Coolies,
Chinese, and Portuguese, with frightful rapidity, by the unnecessary hardships they imposed, the Southern planters, who
have produced ten lives for every one they received, have been
heaped with every stigma and opprobrious epithet that ingenuity could invent!
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