the Slave-trade having been thus
lost again in the Commons, a new motion was made there soon after, by Mr.
Henry Thornton, on the same subject. The prosecution of this traffic on
certain parts of the coast of Africa had become so injurious to the new
settlement at Sierra Leone, that not only its commercial prospects were
impeded, but its safety endangered. Mr. Thornton therefore brought in a
bill to confine the Slave-trade within certain limits. But even this bill,
though it had for its object only to free a portion of the coast from the
ravages of this traffic, was opposed by Mr. Gascoyne, Dent, and others.
Petitions also were presented against it. At length, after two divisions,
on the first of which there were thirty-two votes to twenty-seven, and on
the second thirty-eight to twenty-two, it passed through all its stages.

When it was introduced into the Lords the petitions were renewed against
it. Delay also was interposed to its progress by the examination of
witnesses. It was not till the fifth of July that the matter was brought to
issue. The opponents of the bill at that time were, the Duke of Clarence,
Lord Westmoreland, Lord Thurlow, and the Lords Douglas and Hay, the two
latter being Earls of Morton and Kinnoul in Scotland. The supporters of it
were Lord Grenville, who introduced it; Lord Loughborough; Holland; and Dr.
Horsley, bishop of Rochester. The latter was peculiarly eloquent. He began
his speech by arraigning the injustice and impolicy of the trade:
injustice, he said, which no considerations of policy could extenuate;
impolicy, equal in degree to its injustice.

He well knew that the advocates for the Slave-trade had endeavoured to
represent the project for abolition as a branch of jacobinism; but they,
who supported it, proceeded upon no visionary motives of equality or of the
imprescriptible rights of man. They strenuously upheld the gradations of
civil society: but they did indeed affirm that these gradations were, both
ways, both as they ascended and as they descended, limited. There was an
existence of power, to which no good king would aspire; and there was an
extreme condition of subjection, to which man could not be degraded without
injustice; and this they would maintain was the condition of the African,
who was torn away into slavery.

He then explained the limits of that portion of Africa, which the bill
intended to set apart as sacred to peace and liberty. He showed that this
was but on