Can you not
break their spirit with labour, bind their strength with chains, and
vanquish their obstinacy with dungeons?'
'All this I have done, but they die under the discipline, or escape from
their prisons. I have now three hundred slaves on my patron's estates.
Against those born on our lands I have little to urge. Many of them, it
is true, begin the day with weeping and end it with death; but for the
most part, thanks to their diurnal allowance of stripes, they are
tolerably submissive. It is with the wretches that I have been obliged
to purchase from prisoners of war and the people of revolted towns that
I am so dissatisfied. Punishments have no effect on them, they are
incessantly indolent, sulky, desperate. It was but the other day that
ten of them poisoned themselves while at work in the fields, and fifty
more, after setting fire to a farm-house while my back was turned,
escaped to join a gang of their companions, who are now robbers in the
woods. These fellows, however, are the last of the troop who will
perpetrate such offences.
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