r fortunes. On what part of it they founded their honour he
could not conjecture, except from those passages in the evidence, where
it appeared, that their agents in Africa had systematically practised
every fraud and villany, which the meanest and most unprincipled cunning
could suggest, to impose on the ignorance of those with whom they
traded.

The same gentleman had also lamented, that the evidence had not been
taken upon oath. He himself lamented it too. Numberless facts had been
related by eye-witnesses, called in support of the abolition, so
dreadfully atrocious, that they appeared incredible; and seemed rather,
to use the expression of Ossian, like "the histories of the days of
other times." These procured for the trade a species of acquittal, which
it could not have obtained, had the committee been authorised to
administer an oath. He apprehended, also, in this case, that some other
persons would have been rather more guarded in their testimony. Captain
Knox would not then perhaps have told the committee, that six hundred
slaves could have had comfortable room at night in his vessel of about
one hundred and forty tons; when there could have been no more than five
feet six inches in length, and fifteen inches in breadth, to about
two-thirds of his number.

The same gentleman had also dwelt upon the Slave Trade as a nursery for
seamen. But it had appeared by the muster-rolls of the slave-vessels,
then actually on the table of the house, that more than a fifth of them
died in the service, exclusive of those who perished when discharged in
the West Indies; and yet he had been instructed by his constituents to
maintain this false position. His reasoning, too, was very curious; for,
though numbers might die, yet as one half who entered were landsmen,
seamen were continually forming. Not to dwell on the expensive cruelty
of forming these seamen by the yearly destruction of so many hundreds,
this very statement was flatly contradicted by the evidence. The
muster-rolls from Bristol stated the proportion of landsmen in the trade
there at one twelfth, and the proper officers of Liverpool itself at but
a sixteenth of the whole employed. In the face again of the most glaring
facts, others had maintained that the mortality in these vessels did not
exceed that of other trades in the tropical climates. But the same
documents, which proved that twenty-three per cent were destroyed in
this wasting traffic, proved that in West I