MASTER. Is it impossible, then, to hold you by any ties but those of constraint and severity? Suppose I were to restore you to your liberty, would you reckon that a favour?
Slave. The greatest; for although it would only be undoing a wrong, I know too well how few among mankind are capable of sacrificing interest to justice not to prize the exertion when it is made.
Master. I do it, then; be free.
Slave. Now I am indeed your servant, though not your slave. And as the first return I can make for your kindness, I will tell you freely the condition in which you live. You are surrounded with implacable foes, who long for a safe opportunity to revenge upon you and the other planters all the miseries they have endured. You can rely on no kindness on your part, to soften the obduracy of their resentment. Superior force alone can give you security. As soon as that fails, you are at the mercy of the merciless. Such is the social bond between master and slave!*
abridged
* The final peroration is remarkably similar to the warning offered by Professor Horatio Smith (Leslie Howard) to General von Graum (Francis L. Sullivan) in Pimpernel Smith (1941). “May a dead man say a few words to you, General, for your enlightenment? You will never rule the world, because you are doomed. All of you who have demoralized and corrupted a nation are doomed. Tonight you will take the first step along a dark road from which there is no turning back. You will have to go on and on, from one madness to another, leaving behind you a wilderness of misery and hatred. And still you will have to go on because you will find no horizon and see no dawn, until at last you are lost and destroyed.”