Objection to Abolition on grounds of Justice 312 Objection on grounds of Religion 318 Abolitionists’ further Plea against Slave Trade—Insurrection, extreme danger of 321 Our Population drained to defend the West Indies 330 Summary View of the Miseries produced by the Slave Trade 333 Instance of Individual Misery 340 Conclusion 345 APPENDIX.—A few Specimens in Proof of Effects of the Slave Trade in Africa, and of the natural Dispositions and Commercial Aptitudes 353 to 394 English Slave Trade as carried on so late as Henry 2d’s Time. INTRODUCTION. For many years I have ardently wished that it had been possible for me to plead, in your presence, the great cause of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Conscious that I was accountable to you for the discharge of the important trust which your kindness had committed to me, I have longed for such an opportunity of convincing you, that it was not without reason that this question had occupied so large a share of my parliamentary life. I wished you to know, that the cause of my complaint was no minute grievance, which, from my eyes having been continually fixed on it, had swelled by degrees into a false shew of magnitude; no ordinary question, on which my mind, warming in the pursuit of its object, and animated by repeated contentions, had at length felt emotions altogether disproportionate to their subject. Had I however erred, unintentionally, I have too long experienced your candour not to have hoped for your ready forgiveness. On the contrary, if the Slave Trade be indeed the foulest blot that ever stained our National character, you will not deem your Representative to have been unworthily employed, in having been among the foremost in wiping it away. Besides the desire of justifying myself in the judgment of my Constituents, various other motives prompt me to the present address. Fourteen long years have now elapsed since the period when the question was fully argued in Parliament; and the large share of national attention which it then engaged, has since been occupied successively by the various public topics of the day. During the intervening period, also, such strange and interesting spectacles have been exhibited at our very doors, as to banish from the minds of most men all recollection of distant wrongs and sufferings. Thus it is not only by the ordinary effects of the lapse of time, that the impression, first produced by laying open the horrors of the Slave Trade, has been considerably effaced, but by the prodigious events of that fearful interval.