account be gives of them is affecting: "It is impossible," he says, "for
a human heart to reflect upon the slavery of these dregs of mankind,
without in some measure feeling for their misery, which ends but with
their lives--nothing can be more wretched than the condition of this
people."

Sterne, in his account of the Negro girl in his _Life of Tristram
Shandy_, took decidedly the part of the oppressed Africans. The
pathetic, witty, and sentimental manner, in which he handled this
subject, occasioned many to remember it, and procured a certain portion
of feeling in their favour.

Rousseau contributed not a little in his day to the same end.

Bishop Warburton, preached a sermon in the year 1766, before the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel, in which he took up the cause of the
miserable Africans, and in which he severely reprobated their
oppressors. The language in this sermon is so striking, that I shall
make an extract from it. "From the free savages," says he, "I now come
to the savages in bonds. By these I mean the vast multitudes yearly
stolen from the opposite continent, and sacrificed by the colonists to
their great idol, the god of gain. But what then say these sincere
worshippers of Mammon? They are our own property which we offer
up,--Gracious God! to talk, as of herds of cattle, of property in
rational creatures, creatures endued with all our faculties, possessing
all our qualities but that of colour, our brethren both by nature and
grace, shocks all the feelings of humanity, and the dictates of common
sense? But, alas! what is there, in the infinite abuses of society,
which does not shock them! Yet nothing is more certain in itself and
apparent to all, than that the infamous traffic for slaves directly