voluntarily on board the ships which took them from their native land; and secondly, that they were conveyed to the Colonies principally for their own benefit, or out of Christian feeling for them, that they might afterwards be converted to Christianity.  Take as an instance of the first assertion, the way in which Queen Elizabeth was deceived, in whose reign the execrable slave trade began in England.  This great princess seems on the very commencement of the trade to have questioned its lawfulness.  She seems to have entertained a religious scruple concerning it, and indeed, to have revolted at the very thoughts of it.  She seems to have been aware of the evils to which its continuance might lead, or that, if it were sanctioned, the most unjustifiable means might be made use of to procure the persons of the natives of Africa.  And in what light she would have viewed any acts of this kind, had they taken place to her knowledge, we may conjecture from this fact—­that when Captain (afterwards Sir John) Hawkins returned from his first voyage to Africa and Hispaniola, whither he had carried slaves, she sent for him, and, as we learn from Hill’s Naval History, expressed her concern lest any of the Africans should be carried off without their free consent, declaring, “that it would be detestable and call down the vengeance of Heaven upon the undertakers.”  Capt.  Hawkins promised to comply with the injunctions of Elizabeth in this respect.  But he did not keep his word; for when he went to Africa again, he seized many of the inhabitants and carried them off as slaves, “Here (says Hill) began the horrid practice of forcing the Africans into slavery, an injustice and barbarity, which, so sure as there is vengeance in Heaven for the worst of crimes, will sometime be the destruction of all who encourage it.”  Take as an instance of the second what Labat, a Roman missionary, records in his account of the Isles of America.  He says, that Louis the Thirteenth was very uneasy, when he was about to issue the edict, by which all Africans coming into his colonies were to be made slaves; and that this uneasiness continued, till he was assured that the introduction of them in this capacity into his foreign dominions was the readiest way of converting them to the principles of the Christian religion.  It was upon these ideas then, namely, that the Africans left their own country voluntarily, and that they were to receive the blessings of Christianity, and upon these alone, that the first transportations were allowed, and that the first English grants and Acts of Parliament, and that the first foreign edicts, sanctioned them.  We have therefore the fact well authenticated, as it relates to original Government grants and permissions, that the owners of many of the Creole slaves in our colonies have no better title to them as property, than as being the descendants of persons forced away from their country and brought thither by a traffic, which had its allowed origin in fraud and falsehood.