oes at reasonable rates, and for that purpose the said trade should
be carried on."--Here then we might see what the Parliament had in view,
when it passed this act. But no one of the occasions, on which it
grounded its proceedings, now existed. He would plead, then, the act
itself as an argument for the abolition. If it had been proved that,
instead of being very advantageous to Great Britain, it was the most
destructive to her interests--that it was the ruin of her seamen--that
it stopped the extension of her manufactures;--if it had been proved, in
the second place, that it was not now necessary for the supply of our
Plantations with Negroes;--if it had been further established, that it
was from the beginning contrary to the first principles of justice, and
consequently that a pledge for its continuance, had one been attempted
to be given, must have been absolutely void--where in this act of
parliament was the contract to be found, by which Britain was bound, as
she was said to be, never to listen to her own true interests and to the
cries of the natives of Africa? Was it not clear, that all argument,
founded on the supposed pledge of Parliament, made against those who
employed it?

But if we were not bound by existing laws to the support of this trade,
we were doubly criminal in pursuing it; for why ought it to be abolished
at all? Because it was incurable injustice. Africa was the ground on
which he chiefly rested; and there it was, that his two honourable
friends, one of whom had proposed gradual abolition, and the other
regulation, did not carry their principles, to their full extent. Both
had confessed the trade to be a moral evil. How much stronger, then, was
the argument, for immediate than for gradual abolition! If on the ground
of a moral evil it was to be abolished at last, why ought it not now?
Why was injustice to be suffered to remain for a single hour? He knew of
no evil, which ever had existed, nor could he imagine any to exist,
worse than the tearing of eighty thousand persons annually from their
native land, by a combination of the most civilized nations, in the most
enlightened quarter of the globe; but more, especially by that nation,
which called herself the most free and the most happy of them all.

He would now notice the objection, that other nations would not give up
the Slave Trade, if we were to renounce it. But if the trade were
stained, but by a thousandth part of the criminality which he