le."

Sterne, in his account of the Negro girl in his _Life of Tristram
Shandy_, took decidedly the part of the oppressed Africans. The
pathetic, witty, and sentimental manner, in which he handled this
subject, occasioned many to remember it, and procured a certain portion
of feeling in their favour.

Rousseau contributed not a little in his day to the same end.

Bishop Warburton, preached a sermon in the year 1766, before the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel, in which he took up the cause of the
miserable Africans, and in which he severely reprobated their
oppressors. The language in this sermon is so striking, that I shall
make an extract from it. "From the free savages," says he, "I now come
to the savages in bonds. By these I mean the vast multitudes yearly
stolen from the opposite continent, and sacrificed by the colonists to
their great idol, the god of gain. But what then say these sincere
worshippers of Mammon? They are our own property which we offer
up,--Gracious God! to talk, as of herds of cattle, of property in
rational creatures, creatures endued with all our faculties, possessing
all our qualities but that of colour, our brethren both by nature and
grace, shocks all the feelings of humanity, and the dictates of common
sense? But, alas! what is there, in the infinite abuses of society,
which does not shock them! Yet nothing is more certain in itself and
apparent to all, than that the infamous traffic for slaves directly
infringes both divine and human law. Nature created man free, and grace
invites him to assert his freedom.

"In excuse of this violation it hath been pretended, that though,
indeed, these miserable outcasts of humanity be torn from their homes
and native country by fraud and violence, yet they thereby become the
happier, and their condition the more eligible. But who are you, who
pretend to judge of another man's happiness; that state which each man
under the guidance of his Maker forms for himself, and not one man for
another? To know what constitutes mine or your happiness is the sole
prerogative of him who created us, and cast us in so various and
different moulds. Did your slaves ever complain to you of their
unhappiness amidst their native woods and deserts? or rather let me ask,
did they ever cease complaining of their condition under you their
lordly masters, where they see, indeed, the accommodations of civil
life, but see them all pass to others, themselves unbenefited