That man will make slaves of Black people; for, when he has taken away their character, he will say, _Oh, they are only Black people, why should not I make them slaves?_ That man will take away all the people of Africa if he can catch them; and if you ask him, But why do you take away all these people? he will say, _Oh! they are only Black people—they are not like White people—why should I not take them?_ That is the reason why I cannot forgive the man who takes away the character of the people of my country.”’—MEMOIRS OF GRANVILLE SHARP, p. 369. I conceive more real light and vital heat is thrown into the argument by this struggle of natural feeling to relieve itself from the weight of a false and injurious imputation, than would be added to it by twenty volumes of tables and calculations of the _pros_ and _cons_ of right and wrong, of utility and inutility, in Mr. Bentham’s handwriting. In allusion to this celebrated person’s theory of morals, I will here go a step farther, and deny that the dry calculation of consequences is the sole and unqualified test of right and wrong; for we are to take into the account (as well) the reaction of these consequences upon the mind of the individual and the community. In morals, the cultivation of a _moral sense_ is not the last thing to be attended to—nay, it is the first. Almost the only unsophisticated or spirited remark that we meet with in Paley’s Moral Philosophy, is one which is also to be found in Tucker’s Light of Nature—namely, that in dispensing charity to common beggars we are not to consider so much the good it may do the object of it, as the harm it will do the person who refuses it. A sense of compassion is involuntarily excited by the immediate appearance of distress, and a violence and injury is done to the kindly feelings by withholding the obvious relief, the trifling pittance in our power. This is a remark, I think, worthy of the ingenious and amiable author from whom Paley borrowed it. So with respect to the atrocities committed in the Slave-Trade, it could not be set up as a doubtful plea in their favour, that the actual and intolerable sufferings inflicted on the individuals were compensated by certain advantages in a commercial and political point of view—in a moral sense they _cannot_ be compensated. They hurt the public mind: they harden and sear the natural feelings. The evil is monstrous and palpable; the pretended good is remote and contingent. In morals, as in philosophy, _De non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio_. What does not touch the heart, or come home to the feelings, goes comparatively for little or nothing. A benefit that exists merely in possibility, and is judged of only by the forced dictates of the understanding, is not a set-off against an evil (say of equal magnitude in itself) that strikes upon the senses, that haunts the imagination, and lacerates the human heart. A spectacle of