The poet Cowper seems to have entertained much the same opinion as the Bishop of Salisbury; for in one of his Letters, dated April, 1788, we find him saying: “Laws will, I suppose, be enacted for the more humane treatment of the Negroes; but who shall see to the execution of them? The planters will not, and the Negroes cannot. In fact, we know that laws of this tendency have not been wanting, enacted even amongst themselves; but there has been always a want of prosecutors, or righteous judges, deficiencies which will not be very easily supplied. The newspapers have lately told us, that these merciful masters, have on this occasion, been occupied in passing ordinances, by which the lives and limbs of their slaves are to be secured from wanton cruelty hereafter. But who does not immediately detect the artifice, or can give them a moment’s credit for any thing more than a design, by this show of lenity to avert the storm which they think hangs over them? On the whole, I fear there is reason to wish, for the honour of England, that the nuisance had never been troubled; lest we eventually make ourselves justly chargeable with the whole offence by not removing it. The enormity cannot be palliated: we can no longer plead that we were not aware of it, or that our attention was otherwise engaged; and shall be inexcusable, therefore, ourselves, if we leave the least part of it unredressed. Such arguments as Pharaoh might have used, to justify his destruction of the Israelites, substituting sugar for bricks, (‘ye are idle; ye are idle,’) may lie ready for our use also; but I think we can find no better.” If these arguments of the Bishop be well founded, it follows, first, that the great mark at which every friend of humanity ought to aim, by all lawful expedients, is complete and irrevocable emancipation; secondly, that in the interim, as laws, when committed to the guardianship of the slave-holder, are merely waste paper, the Government and Legislature of this country should take the matter into their own hands, and shape their course to an ultimate extinction of an evil from which they cannot extract all the venom but by slaying the hydra itself; and thirdly, that too much weight should not be given to the representations of persons even of the “best principles and most generous natures,” when “perverted by the influence of passion and habit,” to apologize for, or wish to perpetuate, the enormities of this accursed system. The Bishop in reply to those who defend or connive at West India slavery as a “dispensation of Providence,” and as, indirectly at least, sanctioned by the word of God, observes,