ttempted the abolition of the trade, were led away by a
mistaken humanity. The Africans themselves had no objection to its
continuance.

With respect to the Middle Passage, he believed the mortality there to be
on an average only five in the hundred; whereas in regiments, sent out to
the West Indies, the average loss in the year was about ten and a half per
cent.

The Slave-trade was absolutely necessary, if we meant to carry on our West
India commerce; for many attempts had been made to cultivate the lands in
the different islands by White labourers; but they had always failed.

It had also the merit of keeping up a number of seamen in readiness for the
state. Lord Rodney had stated this as one of its advantages on the breaking
out of a war. Liverpool alone could supply nine hundred and ninety-three
seamen annually.

He would now advert to the connections dependent upon the African trade. It
was the duty of the House to protect the planters, whose lives had been,
and were then, exposed to imminent dangers, and whose property had
undergone an unmerited depreciation. To what could this depreciation, and
to what could the late insurrection at Dominica, be imputed, which had been
saved from horrid carnage and midnight-butchery only by the adventitious
arrival of two British regiments? They could only be attributed to the long
delayed question of the abolition of the Slave-trade; and if this question
were to go much longer unsettled, Jamaica would be endangered also.

To members of landed property he would observe, that the abolition would
lessen the commerce of the country, and increase the national debt and the
number of their taxes. The minister, he hoped, who patronized this wild
scheme, had some new pecuniary resource in store to supply the deficiencies
it would occasion.

To the mercantile members he would speak thus: "A few ministerial men in
the house had been gifted with religious inspiration, and this had been
communicated to other eminent personages in it: these enlightened
philanthropists had discovered, that it was necessary, for the sake of
humanity and for the honour of the nation, that the merchants concerned in
the African trade should be persecuted, notwithstanding the sanction of
their trade by parliament, and notwithstanding that such persecution must
aggrandize the rivals of Great Britain." Now how did this language sound?
It might have done in the twelfth century, when all was bigotry and
superst