As human beings, could not the desire of escape from their master’s possession have originated with themselves?--prompted by the inward and instinctive longings for liberty, which spring perennial in the human breast.
Mann reflects on the natural human longing for freedom, suggesting that enslaved individuals could have been driven by their innate desires to escape.
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They cannot do otherwise with laborers who work by compulsion, for the benefit only of their masters, and whose sole interest in the matter is to do as little and to consume as much as possible.
But the impious hand of man divorces these twin capacities, wherever it denies knowledge.
The north comes to the south, cuts their timber, carries it home, manufactures it, and then brings it back, wrought into a hundred different forms, to be sold to those who would see it rot before their eyes.
Can any man give a reason why Norfolk should not have grown like New York, other than the difference in the institutions of the people?
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