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