"In one of your letters to your father, you speak with honest indignation of the treachery and chicanery of the natives of India. My good friend, you should remember from whom they learned those vices. The first visitors from Christian countries found them a simple, harmless people. But the cursed avidity for wealth urged those first visitors, and all the succeeding ones, to such acts of deception and wanton cruelty, that the poor, ignorant natives soon learned their knavish arts, and turned them upon their teachers. As a resident of your country, Old England, I love it. I love it for its freedom. For the many blessings I enjoy in it England shall ever have my warmest wishes, prayers, and blessings. But I must observe, and I say it with reluctance, that the conduct of your country has been uniformly wicked in the East Indies, in the West Indies, and on the coast of Guinea. The grand object of English navigators, and indeed of all the navigators of Christian nations, has been money, money, money. Commerce was meant by the goodness of Deity to diffuse the various goods of the earth into every part; to unite mankind with the blessed bonds of brotherly love and mutual dependence. Enlightened Christians should diffuse the riches of the Gospel of Peace together with the commodities of their respective lands. If commerce were attended with strict honesty and religion for companions, it would be a blessing to every shore it touched at. "The poor wretched Africans are blessed with a most fertile and luxuriant soil; but they are rendered miserable by what Providence meant for a blessing. The abominable traffic in slaves, and the horrid cruelty and treachery of the petty kings, is encouraged by their Christian customers. They carry them strong liquors, powder, and bad fire-arms to inflame them to madness, and to furnish them with the hellish means of killing and kidnapping. It is a subject that sours my blood. I mention these things to guard my friend from being too hasty in condemning a people who have been made much worse by their Christian visitors. "Wherever thou residest, make human nature thy study. Whatever may be the religion or the complexion of men, study their hearts. Let simplicity, kindness, and charity be thy guides; and with these, even savages will respect you, while God will bless you." The writings of the Rev. Laurence Sterne, who was living in England at that time, were well calculated to inspire humanity toward animals and kindly feelings toward the poor. These writings were very popular, and two of the characters conspicuous in them, called Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, were great favorites with the public. Ignatius Sancho especially delighted in the writings of Sterne; and in 1776, when he was about forty-seven years old, he addressed a letter to him as follows:--