RACIAL PRETENSIONS

"One of the biggest pretensions set up in favor of the enslavement of the African race is its inferiority. If the Britons, Caledonians, Hibernians, and others of the Celtic as well as the Teuton and pure Caucasian races had never been enslaved ; if Caractacus, the king and proudest prince the British ever had up to that period, had not been led in chains and sold by order of Julius Caesar , with many other British slaves, in the public market of Rome; if the British nobles long ago , had not written of their own peasantry, that they were incapable of elevation ; if they had not recorded and passed enactments against the Scotch and the Irish, that they were innately inferior, and totally insusceptible of instruction and civilization, calling them 'heathen dogs, only fit for slaves of the lowest order;' if a general system of serfdom, known as the Feudal System, had not existed generally among the white races of Europe for ages, through all Europe , before a black slave was ever known among the whites; if the whites had not been held in slavery many centuries longer than were the blacks; and finally, if Russia had not, just within the last three years (1864), emancipated her forty-two millions of slaves--ten times more than the African slaves in the United States, allowing four millions to the South,--then there would be some semblance of honesty and sincerity in the continued plea of justice for ages of wrong and crime against an unoffending, helpless people." P. 229-230, "The International Policy of the World towards the African Race, Appendix " LIFE AND PUBLIC WORKS OF MARTIN R. DELANY (1883) by Frank A. Rollin