The third mode of obtaining slaves was by crimes committed or imputed.  One of these was adultery.  But was Africa the place, where Englishmen, above all others, were to go to find out and punish adulterers?  Did it become us to cast the first stone?  It was a most extraordinary pilgrimage for a most extraordinary purpose!  And yet upon this plea we justified our right of carrying off its inhabitants.  The offence alleged next was witchcraft.  What a reproach it was to lend ourselves to this superstition!—­Yes:  we stood by; we heard the trial; we knew the crime to be impossible; and that the accused must be innocent:  but we waited in patient silence for his condemnation; and then we lent our friendly aid to the police of the country, by buying the wretched convict, with all his family; whom, for the benefit of Africa, we carried away also into perpetual slavery.

With respect to the situation of the slaves in their transportation, he knew not how to give the House a more correct idea of the horrors of it, than by referring them to the printed section of the slave-ship; where the eye might see what the tongue must fall short in describing.  On this dismal part of the subject he would not dwell.  He would only observe, that the acts of barbarity, related of the slave-captains in these voyages, were so extravagant, that they had been attributed in some instances to insanity.  But was not this the insanity of arbitrary power?  Who ever read the facts recorded of Nero without suspecting he was mad?  Who would not be apt to impute insanity to Caligula—­or Domitian—­or Caracalla—­or Commodus—­or Heliogabalus?  Here were six Roman emperors, not connected in blood, nor by descent, who, each of them, possessing arbitrary power, had been so distinguished for cruelty, that nothing short of insanity could be imputed to them.  Was not the insanity of the masters of slave-ships to be accounted for on the same principles?

Of the slaves in the West Indies it had been said, that they were taken from a worse state to a better.  An honourable member, Mr. W. Smith, had quoted some instances out of the evidence to the contrary.  He also would quote one or two others.  A slave under hard usage had run away.  To prevent a repetition of the offence his owner sent for his surgeon, and desired him to cut off the man’s leg.  The surgeon refused.  The owner, to render it a matter of duty in the surgeon, broke it.  “Now,” says he, “you must cut it off; or the man will die.”  We might console ourselves, perhaps, that this happened in a French island; but he would select another instance, which had happened in one of our own.  Mr. Ross heard the shrieks of a female issuing from an outhouse; and so piercing, that he determined to see what was going on.  On looking in he perceived a young female tied up to a beam by her wrists; entirely naked; and in the act of involuntary writhing and swinging; while the author of her torture was standing below her with a lighted torch in his hand, which he applied to all the parts of her body as it approached him.  What crime this miserable woman had perpetrated he knew not; but the human mind could not conceive a crime warranting such a punishment.