e we extended
the justice and humanity of the country to the helpless and unhappy
inhabitants of Africa.

Earl Fitzwilliam said he was fearful, lest the calamities of St. Domingo
should be brought home to our own islands. We ought not, he thought, too
hastily to adopt the resolution on that account. He should therefore
support the previous question.

Lord Ellenborough said, he was sorry to differ from his noble friend (Lord
Sidmouth), and yet he could not help saying that if after twenty years,
during which this question had been discussed by both Houses of Parliament,
their Lordships' judgments were not ripe for its determination, he could
not look with any confidence to a time, when they would be ready to decide
it.

The question then before them was short and plain. It was, whether the
African Slave-trade was inhuman, unjust, and impolitic. If the premises
were true, we could not too speedily bring it to a conclusion.

The subject had been frequently brought before him in a way, which had
enabled him to become acquainted with it; and he was the more anxious on
that account to deliver his sentiments upon it as a peer of Parliament,
without reference to any thing he had been called upon to do in the
discharge of his professional duty. When he looked at the mode in which
this traffic commenced, by the spoliation of the rights of a whole quarter
of the globe; by the misery of whole nations of helpless Africans; by
tearing them from their homes, their families, and their friends; when he
saw the unhappy victims carried away by force; thrust into a dungeon in the
hold of a ship, in which the interval of their passage from their native to
a foreign land was filled up with misery, under every degree of debasement,
and in chains; and when he saw them afterwards consigned to an eternal
slavery; he could not but contemplate the whole system with horror. It was
inhuman in its beginning, inhuman in its progress, and inhuman to the very
end.

Nor was it more inhuman than it was unjust. The noble earl, (Westmoreland)
in adverting to this part of the question, had considered it as a question
of justice between two nations. But it was a moral question. Although the
natives of Africa might be taken by persons authorized by their own laws to
take and dispose of them, and the practice therefore might be said to be
legal as it respected them, yet no man could doubt, whatever ordinances
they might have to sanction it, that it was rad