rrelling with their neighbours; in their courts of law many poor
wretches, who were innocent, were condemned; and, to obtain these
commodities in greater abundance, thousands were kidnapped and torn from
their families and sent into slavery. Such transactions, he said, were
recorded in every history of Africa, and the report on the table confirmed
them. With respect, however, to these he should make but one or two
observations. If we looked into the reign of Henry the Eighth, we should
find a parallel for one of them. We should find that similar convictions
took place; and that penalties followed conviction.

With respect to wars, the kings of Africa were never induced to engage in
them by public principles, by national glory, and least of all by the love
of their people. This had been stated by those most conversant in the
subject, by Dr. Spaarman and Mr. Wadstrom. They had conversed with these
princes, and had learned from their own mouths, that to procure slaves was
the object of their hostilities. Indeed, there was scarcely a single person
examined before the privy council, who did not prove that the Slave-trade
was the source of the tragedies acted upon that extensive continent. Some
had endeavoured to palliate this circumstance; but there was not one who
did not more or less admit it to be true. By one the Slave-trade was called
the concurrent cause, by the majority it was acknowledged to be the
principal motive of the African wars. The same might be said with respect
to those instances of treachery and injustice, in which individuals were
concerned. And here he was sorry to observe that our own countrymen were
often guilty. He would only at present advert to the tragedy at Calabar,
where two large African villages, having been for some time at war, made
peace. This peace was to have been ratified by intermarriages; but some of
our captains, who were there, seeing their trade would be stopped for a
while, sowed dissension again between them. They actually set one village
against the other, took a share in the contest, massacred many of the
inhabitants, and carried others of them away as slaves. But shocking as
this transaction might appear, there was not a single history of Africa to
be read, in which scenes of as atrocious a nature were not related. They,
he said, who defended this trade, were warped and blinded by their own
interests, and would not be convinced of the miseries they were daily
heaping on their fell