In the year 1784, Dr. GREGORY produced his Essays, Historical and Moral.  He took an opportunity of disseminating in these a circumstantial knowledge of the Slave Trade, and an equal abhorrence of it at the same time.  He explained the manner of procuring slaves in Africa; the treatment of them on the passage, (in which he mentioned the case of the ship Zong) and the wicked and cruel treatment of them in the colonies.  He recited and refuted also the various arguments adduced in defence of the trade.  He showed that it was destructive to our seamen.  He produced many weighty arguments also against the slavery itself.  He proposed clauses for an Act of Parliament for the abolition of both; showing the good both to England and her colonies from such a measure, and that a trade might be substituted in Africa, in various articles, for that which he proposed to suppress.  By means of the diffusion of light like this, both of a moral and political nature; Dr. Gregory is entitled to be ranked among the benefactors to the African race.

In the same year, Gilbert Wakefield preached a sermon at Richmond, in Surrey, where, speaking of the people of this nation, he says, “Have we been as renowned for a liberal communication of our religion and our laws as for the possession of them!  Have we navigated and conquered to save, to civilize, and to instruct; or to oppress, to plunder, and to destroy?  Let India and Africa give the answer to these questions.  The one we have exhausted of her wealth and her inhabitants by violence, by famine, and by every species of tyranny and murder.  The children of the other we daily carry from off the land of their nativity; like sheep to the slaughter, to return no more.  We tear them from every object of their affection, or, sad alternative, drag them together to the horrors of a mutual servitude!  We keep them in the profoundest ignorance.  We gall them in a tenfold chain, with an unrelenting spirit of barbarity, inconceivable to all but the spectators of it, unexampled among former and other nations, and unrecorded even in the bloody registers of heathen persecution.  Such is the conduct of us enlightened Englishmen, reformed Christians!  Thus have we profited by our superior advantages, by the favour of God, by the doctrines and example of a meek and lowly Savior.  Will not the blessings which we have abused loudly testify against us?  Will not the blood which we have shed cry from the ground for vengeance upon our sins?”

In the same year, James Ramsay, vicar of Teston in Kent, became also an able, zealous, and indefatigable patron of the African cause.  This gentleman had resided nineteen years in the island of St. Christopher, where he had observed the treatment of the slaves, and had studied the laws relating to them.  On his return to England, yielding to his own feelings of duty and the solicitations of some amiable friends, he published a work, which he called An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of the African Slaves