Here the dire locusts’ horrid swarms prevail;
  Here the blue asps with livid poison swell;
  Here the dry dipsa writhes his sinuous mail;
  Can we not here secure from envy dwell?

  When the grim lion urged his cruel chase,
  When the stern panther sought his midnight prey;
  What fate reserved me for this Christian race? 
  O race more polished, more severe than they!

  Yet shores there are, bless’d shores for us remain,
  And favour’d isles, with golden fruitage crown’d,
  Where tufted flow’rets paint the verdant plain,
  And every breeze shall medicine every wound.”

In the year 1755, Dr. Hayter, bishop of Norwich, preached a sermon before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, in which he bore his testimony against the continuance of this trade.

Dyer, in his poem called The Fleece, expresses his sorrow on account of this barbarous trade, and looks forward to a day of retributive justice on account of the introduction of such an evil.

In the year 1760, a pamphlet appeared, entitled, Two Dialogues on the Man-trade, by John Philmore.  This name is supposed to be an assumed one.  The author, however, discovers himself to have been both an able and a zealous advocate in favour of the African race.

Malachi Postlethwaite, in his Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, proposes a number of queries on the subject of the Slave Trade.  I have not room to insert them at full length, but I shall give the following as the substance of some of them to the reader:  “Whether this commerce be not the cause of incessant wars among the Africans—­Whether the Africans, if it were abolished, might not become as ingenious, as humane, as industrious, and as capable of arts, manufactures, and trades, as even the bulk of Europeans—­Whether, if it were abolished, a much more profitable trade might not be substituted, and this to the very centre of their extended country, instead of the trifling portion which now subsists upon their coasts—­And whether the great hindrance to such a new and advantageous commerce has not wholly proceeded from that unjust, inhuman, unchristianlike traffic, called the Slave Trade, which is carried on by the Europeans.”  The public proposal of these and other queries by a man of so great commercial knowledge as Postlethwaite, and by one who was himself a member of the African Committee, was of great service in exposing the impolicy as well as immorality of the Slave Trade.

In the year 1761, Thomas Jeffery published an account of a part of North America, in which he lays open the miserable state of the slaves in the West Indies, both as to their clothing, their food, their labour, and their punishments.  But, without going into particulars, the general account be gives of them is affecting:  “It is impossible,” he says, “for a human heart to reflect upon the slavery of these dregs of mankind, without in some measure feeling for their misery, which ends but with their lives—­nothing can be more wretched than the condition of this people.”