It is trading upon safe grounds.  A commercial intercourse with Africa opens an inexhaustible source of wealth to the manufacturing interests of Great Britain, and to all which the slave trade is an objection.

If I am not misinformed, the manufacturing interest is equal, if not superior, to the landed interest, as to the value, for reasons which will soon appear.  The abolition of slavery, so diabolical, will give a most rapid extension of manufactures, which is totally and diametrically opposite to what some interested people assert.

The manufacturers of this country must and will, in the nature and reason of things, have a full and constant employ by supplying the African markets.

Population, the bowels and surface of Africa, abound in valuable and useful returns; the hidden treasures of centuries will be brought to light and into circulation.  Industry, enterprize, and mining, will have their full scope, proportionably as they civilize.  In a word, it lays open an endless field of commerce to the British manufactures and merchant adventurer.  The manufacturing interest and the general interests are synonymous.  The abolition of slavery would be in reality an universal good.

Tortures, murder, and every other imaginable barbarity and iniquity, are practised upon the poor slaves with impunity.  I hope the slave trade will be abolished.  I pray it may be an event at hand.  The great body of manufacturers, uniting in the cause, will considerably facilitate and expedite it; and, as I have already stated, it is most substantially their interest and advantage, and as such the nation’s at large, (except those persons concerned in the manufacturing neck-yokes, collars, chains, hand-cuffs, leg-bolts, drags, thumb-screws, iron muzzles, and coffins; cats, scourges, and other instruments of torture used in the slave trade).  In a short time one sentiment alone will prevail, from motives of interest as well as justice and humanity.  Europe contains one hundred and twenty millions of inhabitants.  Query—­How many millions doth Africa contain?  Supposing the Africans, collectively and individually, to expend 5l. a head in raiment and furniture yearly when civilized, &c. an immensity beyond the reach of imagination!

This I conceive to be a theory founded upon facts, and therefore an infallible one.  If the blacks were permitted to remain in their own country, they would double themselves every fifteen years.  In proportion to such increase will be the demand for manufactures.  Cotton and indigo grow spontaneously in most parts of Africa; a consideration this of no small consequence to the manufacturing towns of Great Britain.  It opens a most immense, glorious, and happy prospect—­the clothing, &c. of a continent ten thousand miles in circumference, and immensely rich in productions of every denomination in return for manufactures.