It is much to the honour of the English people, that they should have continued to feel for the existence of an evil which was so far removed from their sight.  But at this moment their feelings began to be insupportable.  Many of them resolved, as soon as parliament had rejected the bill, to abstain from the use of West Indian produce.  In this state of things a pamphlet, written by William Bell Crafton, of Tewksbury, and called “A Sketch of the Evidence, with a Recommendation on the Subject to the Serious Attention of People in general,” made its appearance; and another followed it, written by William Fox, of London, “On the Propriety of abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum.”  These pamphlets took the same ground.  They inculcated abstinence from these articles as a moral duty; they inculcated it as a peaceable and constitutional measure; and they laid before the reader a truth, which was sufficiently obvious, that if each would abstain, the people would have a complete remedy for this enormous evil in their own power.

While these things were going on, it devolved upon me to arrange all the evidence on the part of the abolition under proper heads, and to abridge it into one volume.  It was intended that a copy of this should be sent into different towns of the kingdom, that all might know, if possible, the horrors (as far as the evidence contained them) of this execrable trade; and as it was possible that these copies might lie in the places where they were sent, without a due attention to their contents, I resolved, with the approbation of the committee, to take a journey, and for no other purpose than personally to recommend that they might be read.

The books, having been printed, were dispatched before me.  Of this tour I shall give the reader no other account than that of the progress of the remedy, which the people were then taking into their own hands.  And first I may observe, that there was no town, through which I passed, in which there was not some one individual who had left off the use of sugar.  In the smaller towns there were from ten to fifty by estimation, and in the larger from two to five hundred, who had made this sacrifice to virtue.  These were of all ranks and parties.  Rich and poor, churchmen and dissenters, had adopted the measure.  Even grocers had left off trading in the article, in some places.  In gentlemen’s families, where the master had set the example, the servants had often voluntarily followed it; and even children, who were capable of understanding the history of the sufferings of the Africans, excluded, with the most virtuous resolution, the sweets, to which they had been accustomed, from their lips.  By the best computation I was able to make from notes taken down in my journey, no fewer than three hundred thousand persons had abandoned the use of sugar.