England; Louis the Thirteenth, of France.]

It would be considered by many, who have stood at the mouth of a river,
and witnessed its torrent there, to be both an interesting and a
pleasing journey to go to the fountain head, and then to travel on its
banks downwards, and to mark the different streams in each side, which
should run into it and feed it. So I presume the reader will not be a
little interested and entertained, in viewing with me the course of the
abolition of the Slave Trade, in first finding its source, and then in
tracing the different springs which have contributed to its increase.
And here I may observe that, in doing this, we shall have advantages,
which historians have not always had in developing the causes of things.
Many have handed down to us, events, for the production of which they
have given us but their own conjectures. There has been often, indeed,
such a distance between the events themselves, and the lives of those
who have recorded them, that the different means and motives belonging
to them have been lost through time. On the present occasion, however,
we shall have the peculiar satisfaction of knowing, that we communicate
the truth, or that those which we unfold, are the true causes and means;
for the most remote of all the human springs, which can be traced as
having any bearing upon the great event in question, will fall within
the period of three centuries, and the most powerful of them within the
last twenty years. These circumstances indeed have had their share in
inducing me to engage in the present history. Had I measured it by the
importance of the subject, I had been deterred; but believing that most
readers love the truth, and that it ought to be the object of all
writers to promote it, and believing, moreover, that I was in possession
of more facts on this subject than any other person, I thought I was
peculiarly called to undertake it.