be now fit to call to remembrance, when human sacrifices, and even, this very practice of the Slave-trade, existed in our own island.  Slaves, as we may read in Henry’s History of Great Britain, were formerly an established article of our exports.  “Great numbers,” he says, “were exported, like cattle, from the British coast, and were to be seen exposed for sale in the Roman market.”—­“Adultery, witchcraft, and debt,” says the same historian, “were probably some of the chief sources of supplying the Roman market with British slaves—­prisoners taken in war were added to the number—­there might be also among them some unfortunate gamesters, who, after having lost all their goods, at length, staked themselves, their wives, and their children.”  Now every one of these sources of slavery had been stated to be at this hour a source of slavery in Africa.  If these practices, therefore, were to be admitted as proofs of the natural incapacity of its inhabitants, why might they not have been applied to ancient Britain?  Why might not then some Roman senator, pointing to British barbarians, have predicted with equal boldness, that these were a people, who were destined never to be free; who were without the understanding necessary for the attainment of useful arts; depressed by the hand of Nature below the level of the human species; and created to form a supply of slaves for the rest of the world?  But happily, since that time, notwithstanding what would then have been the justness of these predictions, we had emerged from barbarism.  We were now raised to a situation, which exhibited a striking contrast to every circumstance, by which a Roman might have characterized us, and by which we now characterized Africa.  There was indeed one thing wanting to complete the contrast, and to clear us altogether from the imputation of acting even to this hour as barbarians; for we continued to this hour a barbarous traffic in slaves.  We continued it even yet, in spite of all our great pretensions.  We were once as obscure among the nations of the earth, as savage in our manners, as debased in our morals, as degraded in our understandings, as these unhappy Africans.  But in the lapse of a long series of years, by a progression slow, and for a time almost imperceptible, we had become rich in a variety of acquirements.  We were favoured above measure in the gifts of Providence, we were unrivalled in commerce, preeminent in arts, foremost in the pursuits of philosophy and science, and established in all the blessings of civil society:  we were in the possession of peace, of liberty, and of happiness:  we were under the guidance of a mild and a beneficent religion; and we were protected by impartial laws, and the purest administration of justice:  we were living under a system of government, which our own happy experience led us to pronounce the best and wisest, and which had become the admiration of the world.  From all these blessings we must for ever have been excluded, had there been any truth in those principles, which some had not hesitated to lay down as applicable to the case of Africa; and we should have been at this moment little superior, either in morals, knowledge, or refinement, to the rude inhabitants of that continent.