rl Grosvenor could not but express the joy he felt at the hope, after
all his disappointments, that this wicked trade would be done away. He
hoped that his Majesty's ministers were in earnest, and that they would,
early in the next session, take this great question up with a
determination to go through with it; so that another year should not
pass before we extended the justice and humanity of the country to the
helpless and unhappy inhabitants of Africa.

Earl Fitzwilliam said he was fearful lest the calamities of St. Domingo
should be brought home to our own islands. We ought not, he thought, too
hastily to adopt the resolution on that account. He should therefore
support the previous question.

Lord Ellenborough said, he was sorry to differ from his noble friend
(Lord Sidmouth), and yet he could not help saying that if after twenty
years, during which this question had been discussed by both Houses of
Parliament, their lordships' judgments were not ripe for its
determination, he could not look with any confidence to a time when they
would be ready to decide it.

The question then before them was short and plain. It was, whether the
African Slave Trade was inhuman, unjust, and impolitic. If the premises
were true, we could not too speedily bring it to a conclusion.

The subject had been frequently brought before him in a way which had
enabled him to become acquainted with it; and he was the more anxious on
that account to deliver his sentiments upon it as a peer of Parliament,
without reference to anything he had been called upon to do in the
discharge of his professional duty. When he looked at the mode in which
this traffic commenced, by the spoliation of the rights of a whole
quarter of the globe; by the misery of whole nations of helpless
Africans; by tearing them from their homes, their families, and their
friends; when he saw the unhappy victims carried away by force; thrust
into a dungeon in the hold of a ship, in which the interval of their
passage from their native to a foreign land was filled up with misery,
under every degree of debasement, and in chains; and when he saw them
afterwards consigned to an eternal slavery, he could not but contemplate
the whole system with horror. It was inhuman in its beginning, inhuman
in its progress, and inhuman to the very end.

Nor was it more inhuman than it was unjust. The noble earl,
(Westmoreland,) in adverting to this part of the question had considered
it as a