Let the house now contrast the two cases. Let them ask themselves which of the two exhibited the greatest barbarity; and whether they could possibly vote for the continuance of the slave-trade, upon the principle that the Africans had shown themselves to be a race of incorrigible barbarians!
Something like an opposite argument, but with a like view, had been maintained by others on this subject. It had been said, in justification of the trade, that the Africans had derived some little civilization from their intercourse with us. Yes, we had given them just enough of the forms of justice to enable them to add the pretext of legal trials to their other modes of perpetrating the most atrocious crimes. We had given them just enough of European improvements to enable them the more effectually to turn Africa into a ravaged wilderness. Alas! alas! we had carried on a trade with them from this civilized and enlightened country, which, instead of diffusing knowledge, had been a check to every laudable pursuit. We had carried a poison Into their country which spread its contagious effects from one end of it to the other, and which penetrated to its very centre, corrupting every part to which it reached. We had there subverted the whole order of nature; we had aggravated every natural barbarity, and furnished to every man motives for committing, under the name of trade, acts of perpetual hostility and perfidy against his neighbor. Thus had the perversion of British commerce carried misery instead of happiness to one whole quarter of the globe. False to the very principles of trade, misguided in our policy, unmindful of our duty, what almost irreparable mischief had we done to that continent! How shall we hope to obtain forgiveness from heaven if we refused to use those means which the mercy of Providence had still reserved to us for wiping away the guilt and shame with which we were now covered? If we refused even this degree of compensation, how aggravated would be our guilt! Should we delay, then, to repair these incalculable injuries? We ought to count the days, nay, the very hours which intervened to delay the accomplishment of such a work.
On this great subject, the civilization of Africa, which, he confessed, was near his heart, he would yet add a few observations. And first he would say, that the present deplorable state of the country, especially when he reflected that her chief calamities were to be ascribed to us, called for a generous aid, rather than justified any despair, on our part, of her recovery, and still less a repetition of our injuries. On what ground of theory or history did we act, when we supposed that she was never to be reclaimed? There was a time, which it now might be fit to call to remembrance, when human sacrifices, and even this very practice of the slave-trade, existed in our own island. Slaves, as we may read in Henry's history of Great Britain, were formerly an established article of our exports. "Great numbers," he says, "were exported, like cattle, from the British coast, and were to be seen exposed for sale in the Roman market." "Adultery, witchcraft, and debt," says the same historian, "were probably some of the chief sources of supplying the Roman market with British slaves; prisoners taken in war were added to the number; there might be also among them some unfortunate gamesters, who, after having lost all their
