issue. I had been for two years writing about a person, whose
testimony was important. I had passed once through the town in which he
lived, but he would not then see me; I passed through it now, but no
entreaties of his friends could make him alter his resolution. He was a
man highly respectable as to situation in life, but of considerable
vanity. I said therefore to my friend, on leaving the town, You may tell
him that I expect to be at Nottingham in a few days, and though it be a
hundred and fifty miles distant, I will even come back to see him if he
will dine with me on my return. A letter from my friend announced to me,
when at Nottingham, that his vanity had been so gratified by the thought
of a person coming expressly to visit him from such a distance, that he
would meet me according to my appointment; I went back; we dined
together; he yielded to my request; I was now repaid, and I returned
towards Nottingham in the night. These circumstances I mention, and I
feel it right to mention them, that the reader may be properly impressed
with the great difficulties we found in collecting a body of evidence in
comparison with our opponents. They ought never to be forgotten; for if
with the testimony, picked up as it were under all these disadvantages,
we carried our object against those who had almost numberless witnesses
to command, what must have been the merits of our cause! No person can
indeed judge of the severe labour and trials in these journeys. In the
present, I was out four months; I was almost over the whole island; I
intersected it backwards and forwards both in the night and in the day;
I travelled nearly seven thousand miles in this time, and I was able to
count upon twenty new and willing evidences.

Having now accomplished my object, Mr. Wilberforce moved on the 4th of
February in the House of Commons, that a committee be appointed to
examine further witnesses in behalf of the abolition of the Slave Trade,
This motion was no sooner made, than Mr. Cawthorne rose, to our great
surprise, to oppose it. He took upon himself to decide that the House
had heard evidence enough. This indecent motion was not without its
advocates. Mr. Wilberforce set forth the injustice of this attempt, and
proved, that out of eighty-one days which had been given up to the
hearing of evidence, the witnesses against the abolition had occupied no
less than fifty-seven. He was strenuously supported by Mr. Burke, Mr.
Martin, and other