Malachi Postlethwaite, in his _Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce_, proposes a number of queries on the subject of the Slave Trade. I have not room to insert them at full length, but I shall give the following as the substance of some of them to the reader: "Whether this commerce be not the cause of incessant wars among the Africans--Whether the Africans, if it were abolished, might not become as ingenious, as humane, as industrious, and as capable of arts, manufactures, and trades, as even the bulk of Europeans--Whether, if it were abolished, a much more profitable trade might not be substituted, and this to the very centre of their extended country, instead of the trifling portion which now subsists upon their coasts--And whether the great hindrance to such a new and advantageous commerce has not wholly proceeded from that unjust, inhuman, unchristianlike traffic, called the Slave Trade, which is carried on by the Europeans." The public proposal of these and other queries by a man of so great commercial knowledge as Postlethwaite, and by one who was himself a member of the African Committee, was of great service in exposing the impolicy as well as immorality of the Slave Trade. In the year 1761, Thomas Jeffery published an account of a part of North America, in which he lays open the miserable state of the slaves in the West Indies, both as to their clothing, their food, their labour, and their punishments. But, without going into particulars, the general account be gives of them is affecting: "It is impossible," he says, "for a human heart to reflect upon the slavery of these dregs of mankind, without in some measure feeling for their misery, which ends but with their lives--nothing can be more wretched than the condition of this people." Sterne, in his account of the Negro girl in his _Life of Tristram Shandy_, took decidedly the part of the oppressed Africans. The pathetic, witty, and sentimental manner, in which he handled this subject, occasioned many to remember it, and procured a certain portion of feeling in their favour. Rousseau contributed not a little in his day to the same end.