showed themselves under the influence of such gross prejudices, as to render them incompetent judges of the subject they came to elucidate.  They seemed (if he might so say) to be enveloped by a certain atmosphere of their own; and to see, as it were, through a kind of African medium.  Every object which met their eyes came distorted and turned from its true direction.  Even the declarations, which they made on other occasions, seemed wholly strange to them.  They sometimes not only forgot what they had seen, but what they had said; and when to one of them his own testimony to the privy council was read, he mistook it for that of another, whose evidence he declared to be “the merest burlesque in the world.”

But the House must be aware that there was not only an African medium, but an African logic.  It seemed to be an acknowledged axiom in this, that every person who offered a slave for sale had a right to sell him, however fraudulently he might have obtained him.  This had been proved by the witnesses who opposed him.  “It would have stopped my trade,” said one of them, “to have asked the broker how he came by the person he was offering me for sale.”—­“We always suppose,” said another, “the broker has a right to sell the person he offers us.”—­“I never heard of such a question being asked,” said a third; “a man would be thought a fool who should put such a question.”—­He hoped the House would see the practical utility of this logic.  It was the key-stone which held the building together.  By means of it, slave-captains might traverse the whole coast of Africa, and see nothing but equitable practices.  They could not, however, be wholly absolved, even if they availed themselves of this principle to its fullest extent; for they had often committed depredations themselves; especially when they were passing by any part of the coast, where they did not mean to continue or to go again.  Hence it was (as several captains of the navy and others had declared on their examination), that the natives, when at sea in their canoes, would never come near the men-of-war, till they knew them to be such.  But finding this, and that they were not slave-vessels, they laid aside their fears, and came and continued on board with unsuspecting cheerfulness.  With respect to the miseries of the Middle Passage, he had said so much on a former occasion, that he would spare the feelings of the committee as much as he could.  He would therefore simply state that the evidence, which was before them, confirmed all those scenes of wretchedness which he had then described:  the same suffering from a state of suffocation, by being crowded together; the same dancing in fetters; the same melancholy singing; the same eating by compulsion; the same despair; the same insanity; and all the other abominations which characterized the trade.  New instances however had occurred, where these wretched men had resolved on death to terminate their woes.  Some had destroyed themselves by refusing sustenance,