It had also the merit of keeping up a number of seamen in readiness for the state.  Lord Rodney had stated this as one of its advantages on the breaking out of a war.  Liverpool alone could supply nine hundred and ninety-three seamen annually.

He would now advert to the connexions dependent upon the African trade.  It was the duty of the House to protect the planters, whose lives had been, and were then, exposed to imminent, dangers, and whose property had undergone an unmerited, depreciation.  To what could this depreciation, and to what could the late insurrection at Dominica be imputed, which had been saved from horrid carnage and midnight-butchery only by the adventitious arrival of two British regiments?  They could only be attributed to the long delayed question of the abolition of the Slave Trade; and if this question were to go much longer unsettled, Jamaica would be endangered also.

To members of landed property he would observe, that the abolition would lessen the commerce of the country, and increase the national debt and the number of their taxes.  The minister, he hoped, who patronized this wild scheme had some new pecuniary resource in store to supply the deficiencies it would occasion.

To the mercantile members he would speak thus:  “A few ministerial men in the house had been gifted with religious inspiration, and this had been communicated to other eminent personages in it:  these enlightened philanthropists had discovered that it was necessary, for the sake of humanity, and for the honour of the nation, that the merchants concerned in the African trade should be persecuted, notwithstanding the sanction of their trade by Parliament, and notwithstanding that such persecution must aggrandize the rivals of Great Britain.”  Now how did this language sound?  It might have done in the twelfth century, when all was bigotry and superstition; but let not a mistaken humanity, in these enlightened times, furnish a colourable pretext for any injurious attack on property or character.

These things being considered, he should certainly oppose the measure in contemplation.  It would annihilate a trade, whose exports amounted to eight hundred thousand pounds annually, and which employed a hundred and sixty vessels, and more than five thousand seamen.  It would destroy also the West India trade, which was of the annual value of six millions; and which employed one hundred and sixty thousand tons of shipping, and seamen in proportion.  These were objects of too much importance to the country to be hazarded on an unnecessary speculation.

Mr. Grosvenor then rose.  He complimented the humanity of Mr. Wilberforce, though he differed from him on the subject of his motion.  He himself had read only the privy council report, and he wished for no other evidence.  The question had then been delayed two years; had the abolition been so clear a point as it was said to be, it could not have needed either so much evidence or time.