n. He should propose a praedial rather than a personal service for
the West Indies, and institutions, by which the slaves there should be
instructed in religious duties. He concluded by reading several
resolutions, which he would leave to the future consideration of the House.

Mr. Pitt then rose. He deprecated the resolutions altogether. He denied
also the inferences, which Mr. Dundas had drawn from the West-Indian
documents relative to the Negro-population. He had looked over his own
calculations from the same documents again and again, and he would submit
them, with all their data, if it should be necessary, to the House.

Mr. Wilberforce and Mr. Fox held the same language. They contended also,
that Mr. Dundas had now proved, a thousand times more strongly than ever,
the necessity of immediate abolition. All the resolutions he had read were
operative against his own reasoning. The latter observed, that the
Slave-traders were in future only to be allowed to steal innocent children
from their disconsolate parents.

After a few observations by Lord Sheffield, Mr. Drake, Colonel Tarleton,
and Mr. Rolle, the House adjourned.

On the twenty-fifth of April it resumed the consideration of the subject.
Mr. Dundas then went over his former resolutions, and concluded by moving,
"that it should not be lawful to import any African Negros into any British
colonies, in ships owned or navigated by British subjects, at any time
after the first of January 1800."

Lord Mornington (now Marquis Wellesley) rose to propose an amendment. He
congratulated his countrymen, that the Slave-trade had received its
death-wound. This traffic was founded in injustice; and between right and
wrong there could be no compromise. Africa was not to be sacrificed to the
apparent good of the West-Indies. He would not repeat those enormities out
of the evidence, which had made such a deep impression upon the House. It
had been resolved, that the trade should be abolished. The question then
was, how long they were to persevere in the crime of its continuance. One
had said, that they might be unjust for ten years longer; another, only
till the beginning of the next century. But this diversity of opinion had
proceeded from an erroneous statement of Mr. Dundas against the clear and
irrefragable calculations of Mr. Pitt. The former had argued, that, because
Jamaica and the ceded islands had retained almost all the slaves which had
been imported into them, they