But why had the trade ever been permitted at all? The preamble of the act would show: "Whereas the trade to and from Africa is very advantageous to Great Britain, and necessary for supplying the Plantations and Colonies thereunto belonging with a sufficient number of Negros at reasonable rates, and for that purpose the said trade should be carried on"—Here then we might see what the Parliament had in view, when it passed this act. But no one of the occasions, on which it grounded its proceedings, now existed. He would plead, then, the act itself as an argument for the abolition. If it had been proved that, instead of being very advantageous to Great Britain, it was the most destructive to her interests—that it was the ruin of her seamen—that it stopped the extension of her manufactures;—if it had been proved, in the second place, that it was not now necessary for the supply of our Plantations with Negros;—if it had been further established, that it was from the beginning contrary to the first principles of justice, and consequently that a pledge for its continuance, had one been attempted to be given, must have been absolutely void—where in this act of parliament was the contract to be found, by which Britain was bound, as she was said to be, never to listen to her own true interests and to the cries of the natives of Africa? Was it not clear, that all argument, founded on the supposed pledge of Parliament, made against those who employed it?
But if we were not bound by existing laws to the support of this trade, we were doubly criminal in pursuing it: for why ought it to be abolished at all? Because it was incurable injustice. Africa was the ground, on which he chiefly rested; and there it was, that his two honourable friends, one of whom had proposed gradual abolition, and the other regulation, did not carry their principles to their full extent. Both had confessed the trade to be a moral evil. How much stronger then was the argument for immediate than for gradual abolition! If on the ground of a moral evil it was to be abolished at last, why ought it not now? Why was injustice to be suffered to remain for a single hour? He knew of no evil, which ever had existed, nor could he imagine any to exist, worse than the tearing of eighty thousand persons annually from their native land, by a combination of the most civilized nations, in the most enlightened quarter of the globe; but more especially by that nation, which called herself the most free and the most happy of them all.
He would now notice the objection, that other nations would not give up the Slave-trade, if we were to renounce it. But if the trade were stained but by a thousandth part of the criminality, which he and others, after a thorough investigation of the subject, charged upon it, the House ought immediately to vote its abolition. This miserable argument, if persevered in, would be an eternal bar to the annihilation of the evil. How was it ever to be eradicated, if every nation was thus prudentially to wait till the concurrence of all the world should be obtained? But it applied a thousand times more strongly in a contrary way. How much more justly would other nations say, "Great Britain, free as she is, just and honourable as she is, not only has not abolished, but has refused to abolish, the Slave-trade. She has investigated it well. Her senate has deliberated upon it. It is plain, then, that she sees no guilt in it." With this argument we should furnish the other nations of Europe, if we were again to refuse to put an end to this cruel traffic: and we should have from henceforth not only to answer for our own, but for their crimes also. Already we had suffered one year to pass away; and now, when the question was renewed, not only had this wretched argument been revived, but a proposition had been made for the gradual abolition of the trade. He knew indeed the difficulty of reforming long established abuses: but in the present case, by proposing some other period than the present, by prescribing some condition, by waiting for some contingency, perhaps till we obtained the general concurrence of Europe, (a concurrence which he believed never yet took place at the commencement of any one improvement in policy or morals,) he feared that this most enormous evil would never be redressed. Was it not folly to wait for the stream to run down before we crossed the bed of its channel? Alas! we might wait for ever. The river would still flow on. We should be no nearer the object, which we had in view, so long as the step, which could alone bring us to it, was not taken.
He would now proceed to the civilization of Africa; and as his eye had just glanced upon a West Indian law in the evidence upon the table, he would begin with an argument, which the sight of it had suggested to him. This argument had been ably answered in the course of the evening; but he would view it in yet another light. It had been said, that the savage disposition of the Africans rendered the prospect of their civilization almost hopeless. This argument was indeed of long standing; but, last year, it had been supported upon a new ground. Captain Frazer had stated in his evidence, that a boy had been put to death at Cabenda, because there were those who refused to purchase him as a slave. This single story was deemed by him, and had been considered by others, as a sufficient proof of the barbarity of the Africans, and of the inutility of abolishing the Slave-trade. But they, who had used this fact, had suppressed several circumstances relating to it. It appeared, on questioning Captain Frazer afterward, that this boy had previously run away from his master three several times; that the master had to pay his value, according to the custom of the country, every time he was brought back; and that partly from anger at the boy for running away so frequently, and partly to prevent a repetition of the same expense, he determined to destroy him. Such was the explanation of the signal instance, which was to fix barbarity on all Africa, as it came out in the cross-examination of Captain Frazer. That this African master was unenlightened and barbarous, he freely admitted: but what would an enlightened and civilized West Indian have done in a similar case? He would quote the law, passed in the West Indies in 1722, which he had just cast his eye upon in the book of evidence, by which law this very same crime of running away was by the legislature of an island, by the grave and deliberate sentence of an enlightened legislature, punished with death; and this, not in the case only of the third offence, but even in the very first instance. It was enacted, "That, if any Negro or other slave should withdraw himself from his master for the term of six months; or any slave, who was absent, should not return within that time, every such person should suffer death." There was also another West Indian law, by which every Negro was armed against his fellow-negro, for he was authorized to kill every runaway slave; and he had even a reward held out to him for so doing. Let the House now contrast the two cases. Let them ask themselves which of the two exhibited the greater 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 neighbour. 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 should 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 that country, especially when we reflected that her chief calamities were to be ascribed to us, called for our 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 might be now 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 goods, at length, staked themselves, their wives, and their children." Now every one of these sources of slavery had been stated to be at this hour a source of slavery in Africa. If these practices, therefore, were to be admitted as proofs of the natural incapacity of its inhabitants, why might they not have been applied to ancient Britain? Why might not then some Roman senator, pointing to British barbarians, have predicted with equal boldness, that these were a people, who were destined never to be free; who were without the understanding necessary for the attainment of useful arts; depressed by the hand of Nature below the level of the human species; and created to form a supply of slaves for the rest of the world? But happily, since that time, notwithstanding what would then have been the justness of these predictions, we had emerged from barbarism. We were now raised to a situation, which exhibited a striking contrast to every circumstance, by which a Roman might have characterized us, and by which we now characterized Africa. There was indeed one thing wanting to complete the contrast, and to clear us altogether from the imputation of acting even to this hour as barbarians; for we continued to this hour a barbarous traffic in slaves. We continued it even yet, in spite of all our great pretensions. We were once as obscure among the nations of the earth, as savage in our manners, as debased in our morals, as degraded in our understandings, as these unhappy Africans. But in the lapse of a long series of years, by a progression slow, and for a time almost imperceptible, we had become rich in a variety of acquirements. We were favoured above measure in the gifts of Providence, we were unrivalled in commerce, preeminent in arts, foremost in the pursuits of philosophy and science, and established in all the blessings of civil society: we were in the possession of peace, of liberty, and of happiness: we were under the guidance of a mild and a beneficent religion; and we were protected by impartial laws, and the purest administration of justice: we were living under a system of government, which our own happy experience led us to pronounce the best and wisest, and which had become the admiration of the world. From all these blessings we must for ever have been excluded, had there been any truth in those principles, which some had not hesitated to lay down as applicable to the case of Africa; and we should have been at this moment little superior, either in morals, knowledge, or refinement, to the rude inhabitants of that continent.
If then we felt that this perpetual confinement in the fetters of brutal ignorance would have been the greatest calamity which could have befallen us; if we viewed with gratitude the contrast between our present and our former situation; if we shuddered to think of the misery, which would still have overwhelmed us, had our country continued to the present times, through some cruel policy, to be the mart for slaves to the more civilized nations of the world;—God forbid, that we should any longer subject Africa to the same dreadful scourge, and exclude the sight of knowledge from her coasts, which had reached every other quarter of the globe!
He trusted we should no longer continue this commerce; and that we should no longer consider ourselves as conferring too great a boon on the natives of Africa in restoring them to the rank of human beings. He trusted we should not think ourselves too liberal, if, by abolishing the Slave-trade, we gave them the same common chance of civilization with other parts of the world. If we listened to the voice of reason and duty this night, some of us might live to see a reverse of that picture, from which we now turned our eyes with shame. We might live to behold the natives engaged in the calm occupations of industry, and in the pursuit of a just commerce. We might behold the beams of science and philosophy breaking in upon their land, which at some happy period in still later times might blaze with full lustre; and joining their influence to that of pure religion, might illuminate and invigorate the most distant extremities of that immense continent. Then might we hope, that even Africa (though last of all the quarters of the globe) should enjoy at length, in the evening of her days, those blessings, which had descended so plentifully upon us in a much earlier period of the world. Then also would Europe, participating in her improvement and prosperity, receive an ample recompense for the tardy kindness (if kindness it could be called) of no longer hindering her from extricating herself out of the darkness, which, in other more fortunate regions, had been so much more speedily dispelled.
—Nos primus equis Oriens afflavit anhelis;
Illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper.
Then might be applied to Africa those words, originally used indeed with a different view: