ot help, however, distrusting their arguments. He could
not believe that the Almighty Being, who had forbidden the practice of
rapine and bloodshed, had made rapine and bloodshed necessary to any part
of his universe. He felt a confidence in this persuasion, and took the
resolution to act upon it. Light indeed soon broke in upon him. The
suspicion of his mind was every day confirmed by increasing information,
and the evidence he had now to offer upon this point was decisive and
complete. The principle upon which he founded the necessity of the
abolition was not policy, but justice: but, though justice were the
principle of the measure, yet he trusted he should distinctly prove it to
be reconcileable with our truest political interest.

In the first place, he asserted that the number of the slaves in our West
India islands might be kept up without the introduction of recruits from
Africa; and to prove this, he would enumerate the different sources of
their mortality. The first was the disproportion of the sexes, there being,
upon an average, about five males imported to three females: but this evil,
when the Slave-trade was abolished, would cure itself. The second consisted
in the bad condition in which they were brought to the islands, and the
methods of preparing them for sale. They arrived frequently in a sickly and
disordered state, and then they were made up for the market by the
application of astringents, washes, mercurial ointments, and repelling
drugs, so that their wounds and diseases might be hid. These artifices were
not only fraudulent but fatal: but these, it was obvious, would of
themselves fall with the trade. A third was, excessive labour joined with
improper food; and a fourth was, the extreme dissoluteness of their
manners. These also would both of them be counteracted by the impossibility
of getting further supplies: for owners, now unable to replace those slaves
whom they might lose, by speedy purchases in the markets, would be more
careful how they treated them in future, and a better treatment would be
productive of better morals. And here he would just advert to an argument
used against those who complained of cruelty in our islands, which was,
that it was the interest of masters to treat their slaves with humanity:
but surely it was immediate and present, not future and distant, interest,
which was the great spring of action in the affairs of mankind. Why did we
make laws to punish men? It was thei