barbarous, the most despicable opinion of human nature. We, to
the utmost of our power, weaken and dissolve the universal tie
that binds and unites mankind. We practise what we should
exclaim against as the utmost excess of cruelty and tyranny, if
nations of the world, differing in colour and form of government
from ourselves, were so possessed of empire as to be able to
reduce us to a state of unmerited and brutish servitude. Of
consequence, we sacrifice our reason, our humanity, our
Christianity, to an unnatural sordid gain. We teach other
nations to despise and trample under foot all the obligations of
social virtue. We take the most effectual method to prevent the
propagation of the Gospel, by representing it as a scheme of
power and barbarous oppression, and an enemy to the natural
privileges and rights of man."

"Perhaps all that I have now offered may be of very little
weight to restrain this enormity, this aggravated iniquity.
However, I shall still have the satisfaction of having entered
my private protest against a practice which, in my opinion, bids
that God, who is the God and Father of the Gentiles unconverted
to Christianity, most daring and bold defiance, and spurns at
all the principles both of natural and revealed religion."


The next author is Sir Richard Steele, who, by means of the affecting
story of Inkle and Yarico, holds up this trade again to our abhorrence.

In the year 1735, Atkins, who was a surgeon in the navy, published his
_Voyage to Guinea, Brazil, and the West Indies, in his Majesty's ships
Swallow and Weymouth_. In this work he describes openly the manner of