their continuance year
after year, and from age to age?

From information, which he could not dispute, he was warranted in saying,
that on this continent husbands were fraudulently and forcibly severed from
their wives, and parents from their children; and that all the ties of
blood and affection were torn up by the roots. He had himself seen the
unhappy natives put together in heaps in the hold of a ship, where, with
every possible attention to them, their situation must have been
intolerable. He had also heard proved, in courts of justice, facts still
more dreadful than those which he had seen. One of these he would just
mention. The slaves on board a certain ship rose in a mass to liberate
themselves; and having advanced far in the pursuit of their object, it
became necessary to repel them by force. Some of them yielded; some of them
were killed in the scuffle; but many of them actually jumped into the sea
and were drowned; thus preferring death to the misery of their situation;
while others hung to the ship, repenting of their rashness, and bewailing
with frightful noises their horrid fate. Thus the whole vessel exhibited
but one hideous scene of wretchedness. They, who were subdued, and secured
in chains, were seized with the flux, which carried many of them off. These
things were proved in a trial before a British jury, which had to consider,
whether this was a loss, which fell within the policy of insurance, the
slaves being regarded as if they had been only a cargo of dead matter. He
could mention other instances, but they were much too shocking to be
described. Surely their lordships could never consider such a traffic to be
consistent with humanity or justice. It was impossible.

That the trade had long subsisted there was no doubt; but this was no
argument for its continuance. Many evils of much longer standing had been
done away; and it was always our duty to attempt to remove them. Should we
not exult in the consideration, that we, the inhabitants of a small island,
at the extremity of the globe, almost at its north pole, were become the
morning-star to enlighten the nations of the earth, and to conduct them out
of the shades of darkness into the realms of light; thus exhibiting to an
astonished and an admiring world the blessings of a free constitution? Let
us then not allow such a glorious opportunity to escape us.

It had been urged that we should suffer by the abolition of the
Slave-trade. He believed