[160] Defence of Archibald Hamilton Rowan, January 29, 1794: Speeches, ed. Davis, (London, 1847,) p. 182. It was this triumph which lifted Brougham, in our own day, to one of those vivid utterances by which truth is flashed upon unwilling souls. "Tell me not of rights,--talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves. I deny the right,--I acknowledge not the property. The principles, the feelings of our common nature rise in rebellion against it. Be the appeal made to the understanding or to the heart, the sentence is the same that rejects it. In vain you tell me of laws that sanction such a claim. There is a law above all the enactments of human codes,--the same throughout the world, the same in all times: ... it is the law written on the heart of man by the finger of his Maker; and by that law, unchangeable and eternal, while men despise fraud and loathe rapine and abhor blood, they will reject with indignation the wild and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in man."[161] [161] Speech on Negro Slavery, July 13, 1830: Works, Vol. X. p. 216. Granville Sharp did not rest from labor. The Humanities are not solitary. Where one is found, there will others be also. The advocate of the slave in London was naturally the advocate of liberty for all everywhere. In this spirit he signalized himself against that scandal of the English law, the hateful system of Impressment, while he encountered no less a person than Dr. Johnson, whom he did not hesitate to charge with "plausible sophistry and important self-sufficiency, as if he supposed that the mere sound of words was capable of altering the nature of things";[162] also, against the claims of England in the controversy with her American colonies, zealously maintaining our cause in a publication, of which it is said seven thousand copies were printed in Boston[163]; also, in establishing a colony of liberated slaves at Sierra Leone, on the coast of Africa, predecessor of our more successful Liberia; and, finally, as leader, not only against the Slave-Trade, but also against Slavery itself, so that he was hailed "Father of the cause in England," and was placed at the head of the illustrious committee by which it was conducted, though his rare modesty prevented him from taking the chair to which he was unanimously elected. But no modesty could check his valiant soul in conflict with wrong. Not content with his warfare in court, he addressed Lord North, the Prime Minister, warning him in the most earnest manner to take measures for the immediate abolition of Slavery in all the British dominions, as utterly irreconcilable with the principles of the British Constitution and the established religion of the land, and solemnly declaring that "it were better for the nation that their American dominions had never existed, or even that they had sunk in the sea,