the object of their hostilities. Indeed, there was scarcely a single person
examined before the privy council, who did not prove that the Slave-trade
was the source of the tragedies acted upon that extensive continent. Some
had endeavoured to palliate this circumstance; but there was not one who
did not more or less admit it to be true. By one the Slave-trade was called
the concurrent cause, by the majority it was acknowledged to be the
principal motive of the African wars. The same might be said with respect
to those instances of treachery and injustice, in which individuals were
concerned. And here he was sorry to observe that our own countrymen were
often guilty. He would only at present advert to the tragedy at Calabàr,
where two large African villages, having been for some time at war, made
peace. This peace was to have been ratified by intermarriages; but some of
our captains, who were there, seeing their trade would be stopped for a
while, sowed dissension again between them. They actually set one village
against the other, took a share in the contest, massacred many of the
inhabitants, and carried others of them away as slaves. But shocking as
this transaction might appear, there was not a single history of Africa to
be read, in which scenes of as atrocious a nature were not related. They,
he said, who defended this trade, were warped and blinded by their own
interests, and would not be convinced of the miseries they were daily
heaping on their fellow-creatures. By the countenance they gave it, they
had reduced the inhabitants of Africa to a worse state than that of the
most barbarous nation. They had destroyed what ought to have been the bond
of union and safety among them: they had introduced discord and anarchy
among them: they had set kings against their subjects, and subjects against
each other: they had rendered every private family wretched: they had, in
short, given birth to scenes of injustice and misery not to be found in any
other quarter of the globe.

Having said thus much on the subject of procuring slaves in Africa, he