The Quakers in America, it must be owned, did most of them originally as other settlers there with respect to the purchase of slaves.  They had lands without a sufficient number of labourers, and families without a sufficient number of servants, for their work.  Africans were poured in to obviate these difficulties, and these were bought promiscuously by all.  In these days, indeed, the purchase of them was deemed favourable to both parties, for there was little or no knowledge of the manner in which they had been procured as slaves.  There was no charge of inconsistency on this account, as in later times.  But though many of the Quakers engaged, without their usual consideration, in purchases of this kind, yet those constitutional principles, which belong to the Society, occasioned the members of it in general to treat those whom they purchased with great tenderness, considering them, though of a different colour, as brethren, and as persons for whose spiritual welfare it became them to be concerned; so that slavery, except as to the power legally belonging to it, was in general little more than servitude in their hands.

This treatment, as it was thus mild on the continent of America where the members of this Society were the owners of slaves, so it was equally mild in the West India islands where they had a similar property.  In the latter countries, however, where only a few of them lived, it began soon to be productive of serious consequences; for it was so different from that, which the rest of the inhabitants considered to be proper, that the latter became alarmed at it.  Hence in Barbadoes an act was passed in 1676, under Governor Atkins, which was entitled, An Act to prevent the people called Quakers from bringing their Negros into their meetings for worship, though they held these in their own houses.  This act was founded on the pretence, that the safety of the island might be endangered, if the slaves were to imbibe the religious principles of their masters.  Under this act Ralph Fretwell and Richard Sutton were fined in the different sums of eight hundred and of three hundred pounds, because each of them had suffered a meeting of the Quakers at his own house, at the first of which eighty Negros, and at the second of which thirty of them, were present.  But this matter was carried still further; for in 1680, Sir Richard Dutton, then governor of the island, issued an order to the Deputy Provost Marshal and others, to prohibit all meetings of this Society.  In the island of Nevis the same bad spirit manifested itself.—­So early as in 1661, a law was made there prohibiting members of this Society from coming on shore.  Negros were put in irons for being present at their meetings, and they themselves were fined also.  At length, in 1677, another act was passed, laying a heavy penalty on every master of a vessel, who should even bring a Quaker to the island.  In Antigua and Bermudas similar proceedings took place, so that the Quakers were in time expelled from this part of the world.  By these means a valuable body of men were lost to the community in these islands, whose example might have been highly useful; and the poor slave, who saw nothing but misery in his temporal prospects, was deprived of the only balm, which could have soothed his sorrow—­the comfort of religion.