must have convinced the house that if this extension of cultivation be considered only in a national view, it is by no means to be desired by any real well wisher to the secure and abiding prosperity of this country. Thus, sir, it appears that, leaving Africa wholly out of the question, justice and humanity would dictate to us the abolition of the slave trade in the strongest terms, as the only sure expedient for bringing the slaves into that state of comfort wherein it must be our common wish to see them placed; that in the abolition alone can the islands find security, and that this measure is enforced on us by the principles of sound policy, and a regard to the political interests of the British empire.

But, sir, though I have suffered myself to dwell so long on these considerations, I now proceed to that part of the subject which, indeed, most interests my heart. Look to the continent of Africa, and there you will behold such a scene of horrours as no tongue can express, no imagination can represent to itself. The effects of this inhuman commerce are indeed such that we lend our assent to them reluctantly: yet, they are proved so clearly, that it is not possible for any man to doubt of their reality; and were positive testimony defective, the reason of the thing would have rendered it altogether unnecessary. How can it but follow, from our going to that country, and of. fering our commodities to the petty chieftains for the bodies of their subjects, but that they will not be very nice in the means they take to procure the articles, by the sale of which they are to supply themselves with the gratifications of appetites which we have diligently and but too successfully taught them to indulge.

One mode they take is that of committing depredations upon each other's territories; and the very nature and character of wars in Africa is such as might have been expected from the great motive from which they originate. They are a sort of predatory expeditions, of which the chief object is the acquisition of slaves; not, but that as it is natural to imagine, these often prove the occasion of more general

and continual hostilities, inasmuch as they greatly add to the causes of dissension between neighbouring communities. When on a former occasion I urged somewhat to this effect, I remember the direct contrary was asserted, and in defiance of reason and common sense it was said, that wars had never been caused by the slave trade. I repeated my reasoning, and urged that it was not to be expected that I could be able to adduce specifick instances in a country where letters were unknown, and the very existence, as well as the causes of past events, must, in general, be soon forgotten. Again, I was challenged to produce a single instance; the natural barbarity of these people was noticed as being alone sufficient to render Africa a scene of general carnage; and, in particular, the cruelties of a certain king of Dahomey were mentioned, and the dreadful slaughter which attended his invasion of a neighbouring kingdom enlarged on. To say nothing of the unfairness of extending to the whole of that vast district from which we collect slaves, what, at the utmost was only proved of a single kingdom, I must own I was a little shaken in my belief of the representations of the state of this very kingdom itself, when I heard it said by another gentleman, who, though not favourable to our cause, gave his evidence with a frankness and fairness which did him great honour, that the Dahomans were a very happy people. But how was I astonished, how did I admire the strange coincidence, when I found in this very king of Dahomey, the very specifick instance that had been required of me; and that these very cruelties of his, in the conquest of Whydah, on which such stress was laid, were committed by him in a war undertaken with a view of punishing the adjacent nation for having stolen away some of his subjects, for the purpose of selling them for slaves. This curious anecdote was brought to my notice by noble friend of mine, to whose friendship on this, as on many other occasions, I am greatly indebted. In his valu

* Mr. Devaynes.

a

able compilation* you will read the transaction at large; and the reflection is very remarkable which the conduct of the king of Dahomey, in this instance, extorted from a historian, who though himself concerned in the slave trade, seems not to have lost all sense of its enormity. "The king's actions carry great reputation, for, by the destruction of this trade, he relinquished his own private interests for the sake of publick justice and humanity; and I have a natural propensity to wish the king of Dahomey well, since he has redeemed his countrymen from being sold as slaves."

But, sir, the exciting of wars between neighbouring states, is almost the lightest of the evils Africa is doomed to suffer from the slave trade: it is indeed one of the greatest calamities to which we are liable in this more highly favoured quarter of the world; but it is a luxury in Africa. Still more intolerable are those acts of outrage which we are continually stimulating the kings to commit on their own subjects. These are still less to be guarded against, and the cruelty of them is aggravated by the consideration that they are perpetrated by those who, instead of the despoilers and ravagers, ought to have been the guardians and protectors of their people. A chieftain is in want of European commodities, and being too weak or too timid to attack his neigbours, he sends a party of soldiers by night to one of his own defenceless villages; they set fire to it, they seize the miserable inhabitants as they are escaping from the flames, and hurry with them to the ships of the Christian traders, who, hovering like vultures over these scenes of carnage, are ever ready for their prey. Innumerable are the instances of this kind to be met with in the course of the evidence. Captain Wilson, a gentleman of unquestionable veracity and honour, saw armed parties going out to scour the country for many

Lord Muncaster's Historical Sketches of the Slave Trade, and of its effects in Africa, addressed to the people of Great Britain.

successive evenings. You have in the evidence more detailed stories of this kind, which cannot but affect the hardest heart. We are told perpetually of villages half consumed, and bearing every mark of recent destruction; and more than one of our witnesses has been himself engaged in one of these very night expeditions I have mentioned. Nor do we learn these transactions only from our own witnesses, but they are proved by the testimony of slave factors themselves, whose works were written and published long before the present inquiry. But it is not only by the chieftains that these disorders are committed, though even from their attacks poverty itself is no security. Every one's hand is against his neighbour. Whithersoever a man goes, be it to the watering place, or to the field, he is not safe. He never can quit his house without fear of being carried off by fraud or force; and he dreads to come home again, lest, on his return, he should find his hut a heap of ruins, and his family torn away into perpetual exile. Distrust and terrour every where prevail, and the whole country is one continued scene of anarchy and desolation.

But there is more yet behind! It might naturally have been imagined that no means of procuring slaves would be left unresorted to; and accordingly the inventive genius of man, strained to the very utmost in this pursuit, has made the administration of justice itself a fertile source of supply to this inhuman traffick. Every crime is punished by slavery, and false accusations are perpetually brought in order to obtain the price for which the party convicted is to be sold; sometimes the judges have a considerable part of this very price, and universally fees on every trial. But it is needless to insist on the acts of injustice which must hence arise. If with all that we have accomplished by securing the independence of judges, by the institution of juries, and by all our other legal machinery, we have not done too much to secure the equitable administration of law in this civilized country, what must be the consequence in Africa, where every man is stimulated to bring an action against his

neighbour by the hope of obtaining part of the price for which he will sell, and where he knows, the judge, who is to preside, has himself an interest in the conviction. In corroboration of these reasonings, we have again the testimony of the historians of Africa; and we may trace the laws, which were originally mild, gradually growing more and more severe, in proportion to the predominance of the slave trade. Mr. Moore, an author of credit, and himself seven years factor to the African company, says, "since this trade has been used, all punishments are changed into slavery; there being an advantage in such condemnation, they strain the crimes very hard, in order to get the benefit of selling the criminal. Not only murder, theft, and adultery are punished by selling the criminal for a slave, but every trifling crime is punished in the same manner." This, and many other instances of a similar sort, will be found in the compilation I already alluded to.

Nor do we leave it to the natives of this devoted country to commit merely on each other these acts of depredation. Many are the acts of violence perpetrated immediately by the Europeans themselves. Numberless are the instances of this kind recorded in the course of our voluminous evidence; and if there had been any doubt of the existence of such practices, they have been confirmed by some late transactions which, much as I wish to avoid detail, I feel it my duty briefly to relate to the committee; the rather because they are master pieces in their kind, and furnish a complete specimen of the various enormities that attend this detested system.

Some gentlemen will perhaps recollect, that in the year 1789, I stated to the house a curious incident that had passed in the neighbourhood of the river Cameroons, whence the master of a Liverpool ship, of the name of Bibby, fraudulently carried off thirty-two relations of one of the chiefs of the country, who had been put on board as pledges for goods. The enormity of the proceeding excited the utmost indignation in the governour of one of our West India islands,