By this time a large packet, for which I had sent from England, arrived.  It consisted of above a thousand of the plan and section of a slave-ship, with an explanation in French.  It contained also about five hundred coloured engravings, made from two views, which Mr. Wadstrom had taken in Africa.  The first of these represented the town of Joal, and the King’s military on horseback returning to it, after having executed the great pillage, with their slaves.  The other represented the village of Bain; from whence ruffians were forcing a poor woman and her children to sell them to a ship, which was then lying in the Roads.  Both these scenes Mr. Wadstrom had witnessed.  I had collected also by this time, one thousand of my Essays on the Impolicy of the Slave-trade, which had been translated into the French language.  These I now wished to distribute, as preparatory to the motion of Mirabeau, among the National Assembly.  This distribution was afterwards undertaken and effected by the Archbishop of Aix, the Bishop of Chartres, the Marquis de la Fayette, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, the Comte de Mirabeau, Monsieur Necker, the Marquis de Condorcet, Messieurs Petion de Villeneuve, Bergasse, Claviere and Brissot, and by the Marchioness de la Fayette, Madame Necker, and Madame de Poivre, the latter of whom was the widow of the late Intendant of the Isle of France.

This distribution had not been long begun, before I witnessed its effects.  The virtuous Abbe Gregoire, and several members of the National Assembly, called upon me.  The section of the slave-ship, it appeared, had been the means of drawing them towards me.  They wished for more accurate information concerning it.  Indeed it made its impression upon all who saw it.  The Bishop of Chartres once told me, that, when he first espoused our cause, he did it at once; for it seemed obvious to him that no one could, under the Christian dispensation, hold another as his slave; and it was no less obvious where such an unnatural state existed, that there would be great abuses; but that, nevertheless, he had not given credit to all the tales which had been related of the Slave-trade, till he had seen this plate; after which there was nothing so barbarous which might not readily be believed.  The Archbishop of Aix, when I first showed him the same plate, was so struck with horror, that he could scarcely speak:  and when Mirabeau first saw it, he was so impressed by it, that he ordered a mechanic to make a model of it in wood, at a considerable expense.  This model he kept afterwards in his dining-room.  It was a ship in miniature, about a yard long, and little wooden men and women, which were painted black to represent the slaves, were seen stowed in their proper places.