 But the freed people and their descendants were not very much like the white immigrants arriving from Europe. To say the obvious, slavery is very bad for people. It prevents them from developing the useful dispositions and skills that people tend to develop in freedom. Although the immigrants had had a rough time in Europe—that is why they flocked to America—they were better prepared to take advantage of the opportunities available than the slaves. Consequently, they would likely have kept well ahead of the freed people and their descendants even if the civil and political rights of each group were equally protected. The issue is debatable of course. Some black writers, Douglass, for example, seem to think that human beings are resilient, equipped as they are with an almost ineradicable love of liberty, and consequently the slaves would recover readily from the rigors of slavery if only they were given justice. He liked to say that all he asked for the Negro was “simply justice”, though the contexts always left it unclear how much he included in justice, whether it would involve reparation, and whether he was simply denying that he was not asking for “benevolence” or “pity” for the Negro (Douglass 1865: 283). Alexander Crummell, on the other hand, seemed to worry about the enduring effects of slavery especially because of the tendency of its victims to remember its horrors, though interestingly Douglass thought that these memories could be bracing (Crummell 1891: 18, 19). The issue of the effects of the memory of enslavement and domination on recovery from the effects of these evils deserves further study. Whatever the results of that study, however, it does not follow straightaway that the wrongly injured are not owed reparations just because they are resilient enough to recover from the effects of their injuries without it.