to have lost the right use of their eyes, or to have looked through a magnifying glass.  With these the argument of emancipation, which they would have rejected at another time as ridiculous, obtained now easy credit.  The massacres too and the ruin, though only conjectural, they admitted also.  Hence some of them deserted our cause wholly, while others, wishing to do justice as far as they could to the slaves on the one hand, and to their own countrymen on the other, adopted a middle line of conduct, and would go no further than the regulation of the trade.

While these preparations were making by our opponents to prejudice the minds of those, who were to be the judges in this contest, Mr. Pitt presented the privy council report at the bar of the House of Commons; and as it was a large folio volume, and contained the evidence upon which the question was to be decided, it was necessary that time should be given to the members to peruse it.  Accordingly the twelfth of May was appointed, instead of the twenty-third of April, for the discussion of the question.

This postponement of the discussion of the question gave time to all parties to prepare themselves further.  The merchants and planters availed themselves of it to collect petitions to parliament from interested persons against the abolition of the trade, to wait upon members of parliament by deputation, in order to solicit their attendance in their favour, and to renew their injurious paragraphs in the public papers.  The committee for the abolition availed themselves of it to reply to these; and here Dr. Dickson, who had been secretary to Governor Hey, in Barbadoes, and who had offered the committee his Letters on Slavery before mentioned and his services also, was of singular use.  Many members of parliament availed themselves of it to retire into the country to read the report.  Among the latter were Mr. Wilberforce and Mr. Pitt.  In this retirement they discovered, notwithstanding the great disadvantages under which we had laboured with respect to evidence, that our cause was safe, and that, as far as it was to be decided by reason and sound policy, it would triumph.  It was in this retirement that Mr. Pitt made those able calculations, which satisfied him for ever after, as the minister of the country, as to the safety of the great measure of the abolition of the Slave-trade; for he had clearly proved, that not only the islands could go on in a flourishing state without supplies from the coast of Africa, but that they were then in a condition to do it.

At length, the twelfth of May arrived.  Mr. Wilberforce rose up in the Commons, and moved the order of the day for the house to resolve itself into a committee of the whole house, to take into consideration the petitions, which had been presented against the Slave-trade.

This order having been read, he moved that the report of the committee of privy council; that the acts passed in the islands relative to slaves; that the evidence adduced last year on the Slave-trade; that the petitions offered in the last session against the Slave-trade; and that the accounts presented to the house, in the last and present session, relative to the exports and imports to Africa, be referred to the same committee.