Sterne, in his account of the Negro girl in his Life of Tristram Shandy, took decidedly the part of the oppressed Africans.  The pathetic, witty, and sentimental manner, in which he handled this subject, occasioned many to remember it, and procured a certain portion of feeling in their favour.

Rousseau contributed not a little in his day to the same end.

Bishop Warburton preached a sermon in the year 1766, before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, in which he took up the cause of the miserable Africans, and in which he severely reprobated their oppressors.  The language in this sermon is so striking, that I shall make an extract from it.  “From the free savages,” says he, “I now come to the savages in bonds.  By these I mean the vast multitudes yearly stolen from the opposite continent, and sacrificed by the colonists to their great idol the god of gain.  But what then, say these sincere worshippers of mammon?  They are our own property which we offer up.—­Gracious God! to talk, as of herds of cattle, of property in rational creatures, creatures endued with all our faculties, possessing all our qualities but that of colour, our brethren both by nature and grace, shocks all the feelings of humanity, and the dictates of common sense!  But, alas! what is there, in the infinite abuses of society, which does not shock them?  Yet nothing is more certain in itself and apparent to all, than that the infamous traffic for slaves directly infringes both divine and human law.  Nature created man free, and grace invites him to assert his freedom.”

“In excuse of this violation it hath been pretended, that though indeed these miserable outcasts of humanity be torn from their homes and native country by fraud and violence, yet they thereby become the happier, and their condition the more eligible.  But who are you, who pretend to judge of another man’s happiness; that state, which each man under the guidance of his Maker forms for himself, and not one man for another?  To know what constitutes mine or your happiness is the sole prerogative of him who created us, and cast us in so various and different moulds.  Did your slaves ever complain to you of their unhappiness amidst their native woods and deserts? or rather let me ask, Did they ever cease complaining of their condition under you their lordly masters, where they see indeed the accommodations of civil life, but see them all pass to others, themselves unbenefited by them?  Be so gracious then, ye petty tyrants over human freedom, to let your slaves judge for themselves, what it is which makes their own happiness, and then see whether they do not place it in the return to their own country, rather than in the contemplation of your grandeur, of which their misery makes so large a part; a return so passionately longed for, that, despairing of happiness here, that is, of escaping the chains of their cruel taskmasters, they console themselves with feigning it to be the gracious reward of heaven, in their future state”—­