A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Addressed to the freeholders and other inhabitants of YorkshireWilberforce, William
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A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Addressed to the freeholders and other inhabitants of Yorkshire
Wilberforce, William
Antislavery movements -- Great Britain; Slave trade -- Great Britain
With this plan for abolishing, as by a strange perversion of terms it is
styled, instead of confirming and perhaps perpetuating, the Slave Trade,
by the gradual operation of colonial statutes, a plan which, though
tried under the most favourable of all circumstances, has absolutely
failed; which has been declared even by West Indian authority itself to
have been proposed for the sake merely of getting rid of the
interference of the British Parliament; which has been clearly proved to
be utterly inefficient as to practical execution, and which, if it could
be executed, would immediately become inconceivably dangerous—With this
measure, founded on principles essentially and unalterably incompatible,
either utterly inefficient or mischievously active, compare the effects
of the measure which we propose, the abolition of the Slave Trade.
The bad effects of the continual introduction of African Slaves are so
manifest as scarcely to need suggesting. The annual infusion into the
West Indian Colonies of a great number of human beings, from a thousand
different parts of the continent, with all their varieties of languages,
and manners, and customs, many of them resenting their wrongs, and
burning with revenge; others deeply feeling their loss of country and
freedom, and the new hardships of their altered state; must have a
natural tendency to keep the whole mass into which they are brought, in
a state of ferment; to prevent the Slaves in general from emerging out
of their state of degradation; and to obstruct, both in them and in
those who are set over them, the growth of those domestic feelings and
habits, and the introduction of those more liberal modes of treatment,
which might otherwise be deemed both safe, and suitable in the case of
Slaves whose characters were known and who were become habituated to
their situation. But the grand evil arising from the continuance of
importations from Africa, is, that till they are discontinued, men will
never apply their minds in earnest to effect the establishment of the
breeding system.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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