An honourable member (Colonel Tarleton) had disclaimed every attempt to interest the feelings of those present, but had desired to call them to reason and accounts.  He also desired (though it was a question of feeling, if any one ever was,) to draw the attention of the committee to reason and accounts—­to the voice of reason instead of that of prejudice, and to accounts in the place of idle apprehensions.  The result, he doubted not, would be a full persuasion, that policy and justice were inseparable upon this, as upon every other occasion.

The same gentleman had enlarged on the injustice of depriving the Liverpool merchants of a business, on which were founded their honour and their fortunes.  On what part of it they founded their honour he could not conjecture, except from those passages in the evidence, where it appeared, that their agents in Africa had systematically practised every fraud and villainy, which the meanest and most unprincipled cunning could suggest, to impose on the ignorance of those with whom they traded.

The same gentleman had also lamented, that the evidence had not been taken upon oath.  He himself lamented it too.  Numberless facts had been related by eye-witnesses, called in support of the abolition, so dreadfully atrocious, that they appeared incredible; and seemed rather, to use the expression of Ossian, like “the histories of the days of other times.”  These procured for the trade a species of acquittal, which it could not have obtained, had the committee been authorised to administer an oath.  He apprehended also, in this case, that some other persons would have been rather more guarded in their testimony.  Captain Knox would not then perhaps have told the committee, that six hundred slaves could have had comfortable room at night in his vessel of about one hundred and forty tons; when there could have been no more than five feet six inches in length, and fifteen inches in breadth, to about two thirds of his number.

The same gentleman had also dwelt upon the Slave-trade as a nursery for seamen.  But it had appeared by the muster-rolls of the slave-vessels, then actually on the table of the House, that more than a fifth of them died in the service, exclusive of those who perished when discharged in the West Indies; and yet he had been instructed by his constituents to maintain this false position.  His reasoning, too, was very curious; for, though numbers might die, yet as one half, who entered, were landsmen, seamen were continually forming.  Not to dwell on the expensive cruelty of forming these seamen by the yearly destruction of so many hundreds, this very statement was flatly contradicted by the evidence.  The muster-rolls from Bristol stated the proportion of landmen in the trade there at one twelfth, and the proper officers of Liverpool itself at but a sixteenth, of the whole employed.  In the face again of the most glaring facts, others had maintained that the mortality in these vessels did