we sacrifice our reason, our humanity, our christianity, to an unnatural sordid gain.  We teach other nations to despise and trample under foot all the obligations of social virtue.  We take the most effectual method to prevent the propagation of the gospel, by representing it as a scheme of power and barbarous oppression, and an enemy to the natural privileges and rights of man.”

“Perhaps all that I have now offered may be of very little weight to restrain this enormity, this aggravated iniquity.  However, I shall still have the satisfaction of having entered my private protest against a practice, which, in my opinion, bids that God, who is the God and Father of the Gentiles unconverted to Christianity, most daring and bold defiance, and spurns at all the principles both of natural and revealed religion.”

The next author is sir Richard Steele, who, by means of the affecting story of Inkle and Yarico, holds up this trade again to our abhorrence.

In the year 1735, Atkins, who was a surgeon in the navy, published his Voyage to Guinea, Brazil, and the West-Indies, in his Majesty’s ships Swallow and Weymouth.  In this work he describes openly the manner of making the natives slaves, such as by kidnapping, by unjust accusations and trials, and by other nefarious means.  He states also the cruelties practised upon them by the white people, and the iniquitous ways and dealings of the latter, and answers their argument, by which they insinuated that the condition of the Africans was improved by their transportation to other countries.

From this time the trade beginning to be better known, a multitude of persons of various stations and characters sprung up, who by exposing it are to be mentioned among the forerunners and coadjutors in the cause.

Pope, in his Essay on Man, where he endeavours to show that happiness in the present depends, among other things, upon the hope of a future state, takes an opportunity of exciting compassion in behalf of the poor African, while he censures the avarice and cruelty of his master: 

  “Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor’d mind
  Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
  His soul proud Science never taught to stray
  Far as the solar walk, or milky-way;
  Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv’n
  Behind the cloud-topt hill an humbler heav’n;
  Some safer world in depth of woods embrac’d,
  Some happier island in the watry waste,
  Where slaves once more their native land behold,
  No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.”

Thomson also, in his Seasons, marks this traffic as destructive and cruel, introducing the well-known fact of sharks following the vessels employed in it;