egin in the morning and end at night, but were continued for many
weeks, and sometimes by casualties for a quarter of the year. They were not
limited to the precincts of a solitary ship, but were spread among many
vessels; and these were so constantly passing, that the ocean itself never
ceased to be a witness of their existence.

And it must strike us finally, that the misery and crimes, included in the
evil as it has been found in foreign lands, were not confined within the
shores of a little island. Most of the islands of a continent, and many of
these of considerable population and extent, were filled with them. And the
continent itself, to which these geographically belong, was widely polluted
by their domain. Hence, if we were to take the vast extent of space
occupied by these crimes and sufferings from the heart of Africa to its
shores, and that which they filled on the continent of America and the
islands adjacent, and were to join the crimes and sufferings in one to
those in the other by the crimes and sufferings which took place in the
track of the vessels successively crossing the Atlantic, we should behold a
vast belt as it were of physical and moral evil, reaching through land and
ocean to the length of nearly half the circle of the globe.

The next view, which I shall take of this evil, will be as it relates to
the difficulty of subduing it.

This difficulty may be supposed to have been more than ordinarily great.
Many evils of a public nature, which existed in former times, were the
offspring of ignorance and superstition, and they were subdued of course by
the progress of light and knowledge. But the evil in question began in
avarice. It was nursed also by worldly interest. It did not therefore so
easily yield to the usual correctives of disorders in the world. We may
observe also, that the interest by which it was thus supported, was not
that of a few individuals, nor of one body, but of many bodies of men. It
was interwoven again into the system of the commerce and of the revenue of
nations. Hence the merchant--the planter--the mortgagee--the
manufacturer--the politician--the legislator--the cabinet-minister--lifted
up their voices against the annihilation of it. For these reasons the
Slave-trade may be considered, like the fabulous hydra, to have had a
hundred heads, every one of which it was necessary to cut off before it
could be subdued. And as none but Hercules was fitted to conquer the one,
so n