The very ground, therefore, on which the
planters rested the necessity of fresh importations, namely, the
destruction of lives in the West Indies, was itself the strongest
argument that could be given, and furnished the most imperious call upon
parliament for the abolition of the trade.

Against this trade innumerable were the charges. An honourable member,
Mr. Smith, had done well to introduce those tragical stories which had
made such an impression upon the House. No one of these had been yet
controverted. It had, indeed, been said; that the cruelty of the African
captain to the child was too bad to be true; and we had been desired to
look at the cross-examination of the witness, as if we should find
traces of the falsehood in his testimony there. But his
cross-examination was peculiarly honourable to his character; for, after
he had been pressed in the closest manner by some able members of the
House, the only inconsistency they could fix upon him was, whether the
fact had happened on the same day of the same month of the year 1764 or
the year 1765.

But it was idle to talk of the incredibility of such instances. It was
not denied that absolute power was exercised by the slave-captains; and
if this was granted, all the cruelties charged upon them would naturally
follow. Never did he hear of charges so black and horrible as those
contained in the evidence on the table. They unfolded such a scene of
cruelty, that if the House, with all their present knowledge of the
circumstances, should dare to vote for its continuance, they must have
nerves of which he had no conception. We might find instances, indeed,
in history, of men violating the feelings of nature on extraordinary
occasions. Fathers had sacrificed their sons and daughters, and husbands
their wives; but to imitate their characters, we ought to have not only
nerves as strong as the two Brutuses, but to take care that we had a
cause as good; or that we had motives for such a dereliction of our
feelings as patriotic as those which historians had annexed to these
when they handed them to the notice of the world.

But what was our motive in the case before us?--to continue a trade
which was a wholesale sacrifice of a whole order and race of our
fellow-creatures, which carried them away by force from their native
country, in order to subject them to the mere will and caprice, the
tyranny and oppression of other human beings, for their whole natural
lives, them an