It is said, that the corporation of Liverpool, at this time, “believed firmly that the very existence of the city depended upon the continuance of the traffic.” Look at Liverpool now, and reflect what greater rewards, even of a temporal nature, God reserves for men that abjure dishonesty and crime. All collateral motives were brought to bear upon the subject, just as they are at the present time. The Guinea trade was defended “as a nursery for seamen.”--_Ibid._ p. 293. Even as late as 1816, the same class of men, in the same country, opposed the abolition of “white slavery” in Algiers, from the same base motives of interest. It was thought that the danger of navigating the Mediterranean, caused by the Barbary corsairs, was advantageous to British commerce; because it might deter the merchant ships of other nations from visiting it. After Lord Exmouth had compelled the Algerines to liberate their European slaves, he proceeded against Tunis and Tripoli. In giving an account of what he had done, he defends his conduct “upon general principles,” but adds, “as applying to our own country, [Great Britain,] it may not be borne out, _the old mercantile interest being against it_.”--_Osler’s Life of Exmouth_, p. 303. So after Admiral Blake, in the time of Cromwell, had attacked Tunis, he says, in his despatch to Secretary Thurloe, “And now seeing it hath pleased God soe signally to justify us herein, I hope his highness will not be offended at it, nor any who regard duly the honor of the nation, _although I expect to have the clamors of_ INTERESTED MEN.”--_Thurloe’s State Papers_, vol. ii. p. 390. And is commerce, the daughter of freedom, thus forever to lift her parricidal hand against the parent that bore her? Are rich men forever to use their “thirty pieces of silver,” or their “ten thousand pounds sterling,” or their hundreds of thousands of dollars, to reward the Judases for betraying their Savior? Viewed by the light of our increased knowledge, and by our more elevated standard of duty, the extension of slavery into California or New Mexico, at the present time, or even the sufferance of it there, is a vastly greater crime than was the African slave trade itself, in the last century; and I would rather meet the doom of posterity, or of heaven, for being engaged in the traffic then, than for being accessory to its propagation now. Let those who aid, abet, or connive at slavery extension now, as they read the damning sentence which history has awarded against the actors, abettors, and connivers of the African trade, _but change the names_, and they will be reading of themselves. Should our new territories be hereafter filled with groaning bondmen, should they become an American Egypt, tyrannized over by ten thousand Pharaohs, it will be no defence for those who permitted it, to say, “We hoped, we supposed, we trusted, that slavery could not go there;” Nemesis, as she plies her scorpion lash, will reply, “_You might have made it certain_.”