a Roman might have characterized us, and by which we now characterized Africa.  There was indeed one thing wanting to complete the contrast, and to clear us altogether from the imputation of acting even to this hour as barbarians; for we continued to this hour a barbarous traffic in slaves; we continued it even yet, in spite of all our great pretensions.  We were once as obscure among the nations of the earth, as savage in our manners, as debased in our morals, as degraded in our understandings, as these unhappy Africans.  But in the lapse of a long series of years, by a progression slow, and for a time almost imperceptible, we had become rich in a variety of acquirements.  We were favoured above measure in the gifts of Providence, we were unrivalled in commerce, pre-eminent in arts, foremost in the pursuits of philosophy and science, and established in all the blessings of civil society; we were in the possession of peace, of liberty, and of happiness; we were under the guidance of a mild and a beneficent religion; and we were protected by impartial laws and the purest administration of justice; we were living under a system of government, which our own happy experience led us to pronounce the best and wisest, and which had become the admiration of the World.  From all these blessings we must for ever have been excluded, had there been any truth in those principles, which some had not hesitated to lay down as applicable to the case of Africa; and we should have been at this moment little superior, either in morals, knowledge, or refinement, to the rude inhabitants of that continent.

If then we felt that this perpetual confinement in the fetters of brutal ignorance would have been the greatest calamity which could have befallen us; if we viewed with gratitude the contrast between our present and our former situation; if we shuddered to think of the misery which would still have overwhelmed us, had our country continued to the present times, through some cruel policy, to be the mart for slaves to the more civilized nations of the World;—­God forbid that we should any longer subject Africa to the same dreadful scourge, and exclude the sight of knowledge from her coasts, which had reached every other quarter of the globe!

He trusted we should no longer continue this commerce, and that we should no longer consider ourselves as conferring too great a boon on the natives of Africa in restoring them to the rank of human beings, He trusted we should not think ourselves too liberal, if, by abolishing the Slave Trade, we gave them the same common chance of civilization with other parts of the World.  If we listened to the voice of reason and duty this night, some of us might live to see a reverse of that picture, from which we how turned our eyes with shame.  We might live to behold the natives engaged in the calm occupations of industry, and in the pursuit of a just commerce.  We might behold the beams of science and philosophy breaking