upon which all law for the protection of property was founded.  Whatever benefit was derived from that trade to an individual, it was derived from dishonour and dishonesty.  He forced from the unhappy victim of it that, which the latter did not wish to give him; and he gave to the same victim that, which he in vain attempted to show was an equivalent to the thing he took, it being a thing for which there was no equivalent; and which, if he had not obtained by force, he would not have possessed at all.  Nor could there be any answer to this reasoning, unless it could be proved, that it had pleased God to give to the inhabitants of Britain a property in the liberty and life of the natives of Africa.  But he would go further on this subject.  The injustice complained of was not confined to the bare circumstance of robbing them of the right to their own labour.  It was conspicuous throughout the system.  They, who bought them, became guilty of all the crimes which had been committed in procuring them; and, when they possessed them, of all the crimes which belonged to their inhuman treatment.  The injustice in the latter case amounted frequently to murder.  For what was it but murder to pursue a practice, which produced untimely death to thousands of innocent and helpless beings?  It was a duty, which their lordships owed to their Creator, if they hoped for mercy, to do away this monstrous oppression.

With respect to the impolicy of the trade (the third point in the resolution), he would say at once, that whatever was inhuman and unjust must be impolitic.  He had, however, no objection to argue the point upon its own particular merits; and, first, he would observe, that a great man, Mr. Pitt, now no more, had exerted his vast powers on many subjects to the admiration of his hearers; but on none more successfully than on the subject of the abolition of the Slave-trade.  He proved, after making an allowance for the price paid for the slaves in the West Indies, for the loss of them in the seasoning, and for the expense of maintaining them afterwards, and comparing these particulars with the amount in value of their labour there, that the evils endured by the victims of the traffic were no gain to the master, in whose service they took place.  Indeed Mr. Long had laid it down in his History of Jamaica, that the best way to secure the planters from ruin would be to do that, which the resolution recommended.  It was notorious, that when any planter was in distress, and sought to relieve himself by increasing the labour on his estate by means of the purchase of new slaves, the measure invariably tended to his destruction.  What then was the importation of fresh Africans but a system, tending to the general ruin of the islands?