of perpetual hostility and perfidy against his neighbour.  Thus had the perversion of British commerce carried misery instead of happiness to one whole quarter of the globe.  False to the very principles of trade, misguided in our policy, unmindful of our duty, what almost irreparable mischief had we done to that continent!  How should we hope to obtain forgiveness from heaven, if we refused to use those means which the mercy of Providence had still reserved to us for wiping away the guilt and shame, with which we were now covered?  If we refused even this degree of compensation, how aggravated would be our guilt!  Should we delay, then, to repair these incalculable injuries?  We ought to count the days, nay the very hours, which intervened to delay the accomplishment of such a work.

On this great subject, the civilization of Africa, which, he confessed, was near his heart, he would yet add a few observations.  And first he would say, that the present deplorable state of that country, especially when we reflected that her chief calamities were to be ascribed to us, called for our generous aid, rather than justified any despair, on our part, of her recovery, and still less a repetition of our injuries.  On what ground of theory or history did we act, when we supposed she was never to be reclaimed?  There was a time, which it might be now fit to call to remembrance, when human sacrifices, and even this very practice of the Slave Trade existed in our own island.  Slaves, as we may read in HENRY’s History of Great Britain, were formerly an established article of our exports.  “Great numbers,” he says, “were exported like cattle from the British coast, and were to be seen exposed for sale in the Roman markets.”—­“Adultery, witchcraft, and debt,” says the same historian, “were probably some of the chief sources of supplying the Roman market with British slaves—­prisoners taken in war were added to the number—­there might be also among them some unfortunate gamesters, who, after having lost all their goods, at length staked themselves, their wives, and their children.”  Now every one of these sources of slavery had been stated to be at this hour a source of slavery in Africa.  If these practices, therefore, were to be admitted as proofs of the natural incapacity of its inhabitants, why might they not have been applied to ancient Britain?  Why might not then some Roman senator, pointing to British barbarians, have predicted with equal boldness, that these were a people who were destined never to be free; who were without the understanding necessary for the attainment of useful arts; depressed by the hand of nature below the level of the human species, and created to form a supply of slaves for the rest of the world?  But, happily, since that time, notwithstanding what would then have been the justness of these predictions, we had emerged from barbarism.  We were now raised to a situation which exhibited a striking contrast to every circumstance by which