ly took
place; and thus begun that _commerce_, which makes so considerable a
figure at the present day.

But happy had the Africans been, if those only, who had been justly
convicted of crimes, or taken in a just war, had been sentenced to the
severities of servitude! How many of those miseries, which afterwards
attended them, had been never known; and how would their history have
saved those sighs and emotions of pity, which must now ever accompany
its perusal. The Europeans, on the establishment of their western
colonies, required a greater number of slaves than a strict adherence to
the treaty could produce. The princes therefore had only the choice of
relinquishing the commerce, or of consenting to become unjust. They had
long experienced the emoluments of the trade; they had acquired a taste
for the luxuries it afforded; and they now beheld an opportunity of
gratifying it, but in a more extentive manner. _Avarice_ therefore,
which was too powerful for _justice_ on this occasion, immediately
turned the scale: not only those, who were fairly convicted of offences,
were now sentenced to servitude, but even those who were _suspected_.
New crimes were invented, that new punishments might succeed. Thus was
every appearance soon construed into reality; every shadow into a
substance; and often virtue into a crime.

Such also was the case with respect to prisoners of war. Not only those
were now delivered into slavery, who were taken in a state of publick
enmity and injustice, but those also, who, conscious of no injury
whatever, were taken in the _arbitrary_ skirmishes of these _venal_
sovereigns. War was now made, not as formerly, from the motives of
retaliation and defence, but for the sake of obtaining prisoners alone,
and the advantages resulting from their sale. If a ship from Europe came
but into sight, it was now considered as a sufficient motive for a war,
and as a signal only for an instantaneous commencement of hostilities.

But if the African kings could be capable of such injustice, what vices
are there, that their consciences would restrain, or what enormities,
that we might not expect to be committed? When men once consent to be
unjust, they lose, at the same instant with their virtue, a considerable
portion of that sense of shame, which, till then, had been found a
successful protector against the sallies of vice. From that awful
period, almost every expectation is forlorn: the heart is left
unguarded: it