that I might not lose him.  When I arrived, he would give me only private information.  Thus I travelled, backwards and forwards, four hundred miles to no purpose.  At another place a circumstance almost similar happened, though with a different issue.  I had been for two years writing about a person, whose testimony was important.  I had passed once through the town, in which he lived; but he would not then see me.  I passed through it now, but no entreaties of his friends could make him alter his resolution.  He was a man highly respectable as to situation in life; but of considerable vanity.  I said therefore to my friend, on leaving the town, You may tell him that I expect to be at Nottingham in a few days; and though it be a hundred and fifty miles distant, I will even come back to see him, if he will dine with me on my return.  A letter from my friend announced to me, when at Nottingham, that his vanity had been so gratified by the thought of a person coming expressly to visit him from such a distance, that he would meet me according to my appointment.  I went back.  We dined together.  He yielded to my request.  I was now repaid; and I returned towards Nottingham in the night.  These circumstances I mention, and I feel it right to mention them, that the reader may be properly impressed with the great difficulties we found in collecting a body of evidence in comparison with our opponents.  They ought never to be forgotten; for if with the testimony, picked up as it were under all these disadvantages, we carried our object against those, who had almost numberless witnesses to command, what must have been the merits of our cause!  No person can indeed judge of the severe labour and trials in these journeys.  In the present, I was out four months.  I was almost over the whole island, I intersected it backwards and forwards both in the night and in the day.  I travelled nearly seven thousand miles in this time, and I was able to count upon twenty new and willing evidences.

[Footnote A:  Ten or twelve of those, who were examined, much to their honour, came forward of their own accord.]

Having now accomplished my object, Mr. Wilberforce moved on the fourth of February in the House of Commons, that a committee be appointed to examine further witnesses in behalf of the abolition of the Slave-trade.  This motion was no sooner made, than Mr. Cawthorne rose, to our great surprise, to oppose it.  He took upon himself to decide, that the house had heard evidence enough.  This indecent motion was not without its advocates.  Mr. Wilberforce set forth the injustice of this attempt; and proved, that out of eighty-one days, which had been given up to the hearing of evidence, the witnesses against the abolition had occupied no less than fifty-seven.  He was strenuously supported by Mr. Burke, Mr. Martin, and other respectable members.  At length, the debate ended in favour of the original motion, and a committee was appointed accordingly.