of motives, yet the conquerors and the conquered were sometimes blended afterwards into one people; so that a system of common interest arose out of former differences.  But where was the analogy of the cases?  Was it only at the outset that we could trace violence and injustice on the part of the Slave-trade?  Were the oppressors and the oppressed so reconciled, that enmities ultimately ceased?—­No.  Was it reasonable then to urge a prescriptive right, not to the fruits of an antient and forgotten evil, but to a series of new violences; to a chain of fresh enormities; to cruelties continually repeated; and of which every instance inflicted a fresh calamity, and constituted a separate and substantial crime?

The debate being over, the House divided; when it appeared that there were for Mr. Wilberforce’s motion seventy-four, but against it eighty-two.

The motion for the general abolition of the Slave-trade having been thus lost again in the Commons, a new motion was made there soon after, by Mr. Henry Thornton, on the same subject.  The prosecution of this traffic on certain parts of the coast of Africa had become so injurious to the new settlement at Sierra Leone, that not only its commercial prospects were impeded, but its safety endangered.  Mr. Thornton therefore brought in a bill to confine the Slave-trade within certain limits.  But even this bill, though it had for its object only to free a portion of the coast from the ravages of this traffic, was opposed by Mr. Gascoyne, Dent, and others.  Petitions also were presented against it.  At length, after two divisions, on the first of which there were thirty-two votes to twenty-seven, and on the second thirty-eight to twenty-two, it passed through all its stages.

When it was introduced into the Lords the petitions were renewed against it.  Delay also was interposed to its progress by the examination of witnesses.  It was not till the fifth of July that the matter was brought to issue.  The opponents of the bill at that time were, the Duke of Clarence, Lord Westmoreland, Lord Thurlow, and the Lords Douglas and Hay, the two latter being Earls of Morton and Kinnoul in Scotland.  The supporters of it were Lord Grenville, who introduced it; Lord Loughborough; Holland; and Dr. Horsley, bishop of Rochester.  The latter was peculiarly eloquent.  He began his speech by arraigning the injustice and impolicy of the trade:  injustice, he said, which no considerations of policy could extenuate; impolicy, equal in degree to its injustice.

He well knew that the advocates for the Slave-trade had endeavoured to represent the project for abolition as a branch of jacobinism; but they, who supported it, proceeded upon no visionary motives of equality or of the imprescriptible rights of man.  They strenuously upheld the gradations of civil society:  but they did indeed affirm that these gradations were, both ways, both as they ascended and as they descended, limited.  There was an existence of power, to which no good king would aspire; and there was an extreme condition of subjection, to which man could not be degraded without injustice; and this they would maintain was the condition of the African, who was torn away into slavery.