ld not
help lifting his voice against this monstrous traffic in the sinews and
blood of man, the toleration of which had so long been the disgrace of the
British legislature. He did not charge the enormous guilt resulting from it
upon the nation at large; for the nation had washed its hands of it by the
numerous petitions it had sent against it; and it had since been a matter
of astonishment to all Christendom, how the constitutional guardians of
British freedom should have sanctioned elsewhere the greatest system of
cruelty and oppression in the world.

He said that a curse attended this trade even in the mode of defending it.
By a certain fatality, none but the vilest arguments were brought forward,
which corrupted the very persons, who used them. Every one of these were
built on the narrow ground of interest; of pecuniary profit; of sordid
gain; in opposition to every higher consideration; to every motive that had
reference to humanity, justice, and religion; or to that great principle,
which comprehended them all. Place only before the most determined advocate
of this odious traffic the exact image of himself in the garb and harness
of a slave, dragged and whipped about like a beast: place this image also
before him, and paint it as that of one without a ray of hope to cheer him;
and you would extort from him the reluctant confession, that he would not
endure for an hour the misery, to which he condemned his fellow-man for
life. How dared he then to use this selfish plea of interest against the
voice of the generous sympathies of his nature? But even upon this narrow
ground the advocates for the traffic had been defeated. If the unhallowed
argument of expediency was worth any thing when opposed to moral rectitude,
or if it were to supersede the precepts of Christianity, where was a man to
stop, or what line was he to draw? For any thing he knew, it might be
physically true, that human blood was the best manure for the land; but who
ought to shed it on that account? True expediency, however, was, where it
ever would be found, on the side of that system, which was most merciful
and just. He asked how it happened, that sugar could be imported cheaper
from the East Indies, than from the West, notwithstanding the vast
difference of the length of the voyages, but on account of the impolicy of
slavery, or that it was made in the former case by the industry of free
men, and in the latter by the languid drudgery of slaves.