It was a sufficient reply, that if the West Indians would but reform the glaring abuses of their system of management, abuses to which not only every humane but every just mind must be anxious to put an end; importations of Slaves from Africa would be rendered perfectly unnecessary, by the natural increase of their domestic stock; while from the stopping of these importations, various and highly important advantages would follow, to the West Indians themselves as well as to the empire at large. But supposing the case to have been otherwise, and that the West Indians might be likely to suffer in their property from our abolition of the Slave Trade; the inference suggested by justice, I say not by self-interest, but by justice, would be, that the West Indians should be compensated out of the treasury of the mother country, or rather, that the loss should fall in equal shares on all the several parties. But for justice to be supposed to inculcate, that because (from our being ignorant, it is to be hoped, of the real nature and effects of the Slave Trade) we had been accustomed to ravage the unprotected shores of Africa, and bring away by force a number of innocent men, women, and children, to carry them in the hold of a Slave ship in fetters, across the Atlantic, and consign the survivors and their descendants for ever to a state of hopeless and most degraded bondage;—to argue, that, because for two centuries we had pursued this course of wickedness and cruelty, or because, which is not fact, we had even engaged to continue it—that we are bound by the obligation of duty to admit the equity of such a prescription, or to fulfil such an engagement, is certainly a most extraordinary lesson for justice to be supposed to inculcate. Supposing us to be the debtors of the West Indians, what right have we, as was so well urged by my excellent friend, Mr. Gisborne, to pay British debts with the flesh and blood of Africans? The absurdity of this argument, not to mention its profane usurpation of the sacred name of justice, is too manifest to require any further comment.