him in promoting the cause of the oppressed.

He wrote also a letter to the Countess of Huntingdon on the following
subject:--She had founded a college, at the recommendation of George
Whitfield, called the Orphan-house near Savannah, in Georgia, and had
endowed it. The object of this institution was to furnish scholastic
instruction to the poor, and to prepare some of them for the ministry.
George Whitfield, ever attentive to the cause of the poor Africans,
thought that this institution might have been useful to them also; but
soon after his death, they who succeeded him bought slaves, and these in
unusual numbers to extend the rice and indigo plantations belonging to
the college. The letter then in question was written by Anthony Benezet,
in order to lay before the Countess, as a religious woman, the misery
she was occasioning in Africa, by allowing the managers of her college
in Georgia to give encouragement to the Slave Trade. The Countess
replied, that such a measure should never have her countenance, and that
she would take care to prevent it.

On discovering that the Abbe Raynal had brought out his celebrated work,
in which he manifested a tender feeling in behalf of the injured
Africans, he entered into a correspondence with him, hoping to make him
yet more useful to their cause.

Finding, also, in the year 1783 that the Slave Trade, which had greatly
declined during the American war, was reviving, he addressed a pathetic
letter to our Queen, (as I mentioned in the last chapter,) who, on
hearing the high character of the writer of it from Benjamin West,
received it with marks of peculiar condescension and attention. The
following is a copy of it:--

TO CHARLOTTE, QUEEN OF GREAT BRITAIN.

Impressed with a sense of religious duty, and encouraged by the
opinion generally entertained of thy benevolent disposition to
succor the distressed, I take the liberty; very respectfully, to
offer to thy perusal some tracts, which, I believe, faithfully
describe the suffering condition of many hundred thousands of
our fellow-creatures of the African race, great numbers of whom,
rent from every tender connexion in life, are annually taken
from their native land; to endure, in the American islands and
plantations, a most rigorous and cruel slavery; whereby many,
very many of them, are brought to a melancholy and untimely end.

When it is considered that the inhabitants of Gr