Earl Fitzwilliam said he was fearful, lest the calamities of St. Domingo should be brought home to our own islands.  We ought not, he thought, too hastily to adopt the resolution on that account.  He should therefore support the previous question.

Lord Ellenborough said, he was sorry to differ from his noble friend (Lord Sidmouth), and yet he could not help saying that if after twenty years, during which this question had been discussed by both Houses of Parliament, their Lordships’ judgments were not ripe for its determination, he could not look with any confidence to a time, when they would be ready to decide it.

The question then before them was short and plain.  It was, whether the African Slave-trade was inhuman, unjust, and impolitic.  If the premises were true, we could not too speedily bring it to a conclusion.

The subject had been frequently brought before him in a way, which had enabled him to become acquainted with it; and he was the more anxious on that account to deliver his sentiments upon it as a peer of Parliament, without reference to any thing he had been called upon to do in the discharge of his professional duty.  When he looked at the mode in which this traffic commenced, by the spoliation of the rights of a whole quarter of the globe; by the misery of whole nations of helpless Africans; by tearing them from their homes, their families, and their friends; when he saw the unhappy victims carried away by force; thrust into a dungeon in the hold of a ship, in which the interval of their passage from their native to a foreign land was filled up with misery, under every degree of debasement, and in chains; and when he saw them afterwards consigned to an eternal slavery; he could not but contemplate the whole system with horror.  It was inhuman in its beginning, inhuman in its progress, and inhuman to the very end.

Nor was it more inhuman than it was unjust.  The noble earl, (Westmoreland) in adverting to this part of the question, had considered it as a question of justice between two nations.  But it was a moral question.  Although the natives of Africa might be taken by persons authorized by their own laws to take and dispose of them, and the practice therefore might be said to be legal as it respected them, yet no man could doubt, whatever ordinances they might have to sanction it, that it was radically, essentially, and in principle, unjust; and therefore there could be no excuse for us in continuing it.  On the general principle of natural justice, which was paramount to all ordinances of men, it was quite impossible to defend this traffic; and he agreed with the noble baron (Hawkesbury) that, having decided that it was inhuman and unjust, we should not inquire whether it was impolitic.  Indeed, the inquiry itself would be impious; for it was the common ordinance of God, that that, which was inhuman and unjust, should never be for the good of man.  Its impolicy therefore was included in its injustice and its inhumanity.