wickedness of the fiends. Casks are filled with the slave, and in these
they are stowed away; or to lighten the vessel, they are flung overboard
by the score; sometimes they are flung overboard in casks, that the
chasing ship may be detained by endeavours to pick them up; the dying
and the dead strew the deck; women giving birth to the fruit of the
womb, amidst the corpses of their husbands and their children; and
other, yet worse and nameless atrocities, fill up the terrible picture,
of impotent justice and triumphant guilt. But the guilt is not all
Spanish and Portuguese. The English Government can enforce its demands
on the puny cabinets of Madrid and Lisbon, scarce conscious of a
substantive existence, in all that concerns our petty interests:
wherever justice and mercy to mankind demand our interference, there our
voice sinks within us, and no sound is uttered. That any treaty without
an outfit clause should be suffered to exist between powers so situated,
is an outrage upon all justice, all reason, all common sense. But one
thing is certain, that unless we are to go further, we have gone too
far, and must in mercy to hapless Africa retrace our steps. Unless we
really put the traffic down with a strong hand, and instantly, we must
instantly repeal the treaties that pretended to abolish it, for these
exacerbate the evil a hundred fold, and are ineffectual to any one
purpose but putting money into the pockets of our men of war. The fact
is as unquestionable, as it is appalling, that all our anxious
endeavours to extinguish the Foreign Slave Trade, have ended in making
it incomparably worse than it was before we pretended to put it down;
that owing to our efforts, there are thrice the number of slaves yearly
torn from Africa; and that wholly because of our efforts, two thirds of
these are murdered on the high seas and in the holds of the pirate
vessels.

It is said, that when these scenes were described to an indignant nation