e had endeavoured to palliate this circumstance;
but there was not one who did not more or less admit it to be true. By
one the Slave Trade was called the concurrent cause, by the majority it
was acknowledged to be the principal motive, of the African wars. The
same might be said with respect to those instances of treachery and
injustice, in which individuals were concerned. And here he was sorry to
observe that our own countrymen were often guilty. He would only at
present advert to the tragedy at Calabar, where two-large African
villages, having been for some time at war, made peace. This peace was
to have, been ratified by intermarriages; but some of our captains, who
were there, seeing their trade would be stopped for a while, sowed
dissension again between them. They actually set one village against the
other, took a share in the contest, massacred many of the inhabitants,
and carried others of them away as slaves. But shocking as this
transaction might appear, there was not a single history of Africa to be
read, in which scenes of as atrocious a nature were not related. They,
he said, who defended this trade, were warped and blinded by their own
interests, and would not be convinced of the miseries they were daily
heaping on their fellow creatures. By the countenance, they gave it,
they had reduced the inhabitants of Africa to a worse state than that of
the most barbarous nation. They had destroyed what ought to have been
the bond of union and safety among them; they had introduced discord and
anarchy among them; they had set kings against their subjects, and
subjects against each other; they had rendered every private family
wretched; they had, in short, given birth to scenes of injustice and
misery not to be found in any other quarter of the globe.

Having said thus much on the subject of procuring slaves in, Africa, he
would now go to that of the transportation of them. And here he had
fondly hoped, that when men with affections and feelings like our own
had been torn from their country, and everything dear to them, he should
have found some mitigation of their sufferings; but the sad reverse was
the case. This was the most wretched part of the whole subject. He was
incapable, of impressing the House with what he felt upon it. A
description of their conveyance was impossible. So much misery
condensed, in so little room was more than the human imagination had
ever before conceived. Think only of six hundred perso