The counterpart of the evil in its third branch is to be seen in the conduct of those, who, when these miserable people have been landed, purchase and carry them to their respective homes.  And let us see whether a mass of wickedness is not generated also in the present case.  Can those have nothing to answer for, who separate the faithful ties which nature and religion have created?  Can their feelings be otherwise than corrupted, who consider their fellow-creatures as brutes, or treat those as cattle, who may become the temples of the Holy Spirit, and in whom the Divinity disdains not himself to dwell?  Is there no injustice in forcing men to labour without wages?  Is there no breach of duty, when we are commanded to clothe the naked, and feed the hungry, and visit the sick and in prison, in exposing them to want, in torturing them by cruel punishment, and in grinding them down, by hard labour, so as to shorten their days?  Is there no crime in adopting a system, which keeps down all the noble faculties of their souls, and which positively debases and corrupts their nature?  Is there no crime in perpetuating these evils among their innocent offspring?  And finally, besides all these crimes, is there not naturally in the familiar sight of the exercise, but more especially in the exercise itself, of uncontrolled power, that which vitiates the internal man?  In seeing misery stalk daily over the land, do not all become insensibly hardened?  By giving birth to that misery themselves, do they not become abandoned?  In what state of society are the corrupt appetites so easily, so quickly, and so frequently indulged, and where else, by means of frequent indulgence, do these experience such a monstrous growth?  Where else is the temper subject to such frequent irritation, or passion to such little control?  Yes—­If the unhappy slave is in an unfortunate situation, so is the tyrant who holds him.  Action and reaction are equal to each other, as well in the moral as in the natural world.  You cannot exercise an improper dominion over a fellow-creature, but by a wise ordering of Providence you must necessarily injure yourself.

Having now considered the nature of the evil of the Slave-trade in its three separate departments of suffering, and in its corresponding counterparts of guilt, I shall make a few observations on the extent of it.

On this subject it must strike us, that the misery and the crimes included in the evil, as it has been found in Africa, were not like common maladies, which make a short or periodical visit and then are gone, but that they were continued daily.  Nor were they like diseases, which from local causes attack a village or a town, and by the skill of the physician, under the blessing of Providence, are removed, but they affected a whole continent.  The trade with all its horrors began at the river Senegal, and continued, winding with the coast, through its several geographical divisions to Cape Negro; a distance of more than three