But he would appeal to the acts themselves.  That of 23 George II. c. 31, was the one upon which the greatest stress was laid.  How would the House be surprised to hear that the very outrages committed in the prosecution of this trade had been forbidden by that act!  “No master of a ship trading to Africa,” says the act, “shall by fraud, force, or violence, or by any indirect practice whatever, take on board or carry away from that coast any Negro, or native of that country, or commit any violence on the natives, to the prejudice of the said trade; and every person so offending, shall for every such offence forfeit one hundred pounds.”  But the whole trade had been demonstrated to be a system of fraud, force, and violence; and therefore the contract was daily violated, under which the Parliament allowed it to continue.

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 Negroes 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 Negroes;—­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.