Page:Omniana 2.djvu/13

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OMNIANA.
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present to their senses. Other miseries, though equally certain and far more terrible, they not only do not endeavour to remedy; they support them, they fatten on them. Provided the dunghill be not before their parlour-window, they are well content to know that it exists, and that it is the hot bed of their luxuries.

"To this grievous failing we must attribute the frequency of war, and the long continuance of the slave-trade. The merchant found no argument against it in his ledger; the citizen at the crowded feast was not nauseated by the filth of the slave vessel; the fine lady's nerves were not shattered by the shrieks. She could sip a beverage sweetened with the product of human blood, and worse than that, of human guilt, and weep the while over the refined sorrows of Werter or of Clementina. But sensibility is not benevolence. Nay,by making us tremblingly alive to trifling

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