; and of which every instance inflicted a fresh calamity, and
constituted a separate and substantial crime?

The debate being over, the House divided; when it appeared that there
were for Mr. Wilberforce's motion seventy-four, but against it
eighty-two.

The motion for the general abolition of the Slave Trade having been thus
lost again in the Commons, a new motion was made there soon after, by
Mr. Henry Thornton, on the same subject. The prosecution of this
traffic, on certain parts of the coast of Africa, had become so
injurious to the new settlement at Sierra Leone, that not only its
commercial prospects were but its safety endangered. Mr. Thornton,
therefore brought in a bill to confine the Slave Trade within certain
limits. But even this bill, though it had for its object only to free a
portion of the coast from the ravages of this traffic, was opposed by
Mr. Gascoyne, Dent, and others. Petitions also were presented against
it. At length, after two divisions, on the first of which there were
thirty-two votes to twenty-seven, and on the second thirty-eight to
twenty-two, it passed through all its stages.

When it was introduced into the Lords the petitions were renewed against
it. Delay also was interposed to its progress by the examination of
witnesses. It was not till the fifth of July that the matter was brought
to issue. The opponents of the bill, at that time, were the Duke of
Clarence, Lord Westmoreland, Lord Thurlow, and the Lords Douglas and
Hay, the two latter being Earls of Morton and Kinnoul, in Scotland. The
supporters of it were Lord Grenville, who introduced it, Lord
Loughborough, Lord Holland, and Dr. Horsley, Bishop of Rochester: the
latter was peculiarly eloquent. He began his speech, by arraigning the
injustice and impolicy of the trade:--"injustice," he said, "which no
considerations of policy could extenuate; impolicy, equal in degree to
its injustice."

He well knew that the advocates for the Slave Trade had endeavoured to
represent the project for abolition, as a branch of jacobinism; but they
who supported it proceeded upon no visionary motives of equality, or of
the imprescriptible rights of man. They strenuously upheld the
gradations of civil society: but they did, indeed, affirm that these
gradations were, both ways, both as they ascended and as they descended,
limited. There was an existence of power, to which no good king would
aspire; and there was an extreme condition of subjection,