be so laid down as to render necessary some knowledge of either an innocent or of a guilty nature, in the party residing in England, of the plans and objects of the party abroad by whose order and for whose account he has shipped goods to the port indicated to him. This or that knowledge must exist in the agent: he must be called upon to produce even the very foreign merchant himself, over whom the Court can give the accused no control, over whom he himself is not shown to possess any, and whose testimony after all could not be trusted; since that of the accused, as recorded before the Committee, is not. If in this, or in some other way, he does not prove knowledge of an innocent object, the object must be taken to be a guilty one; and as the law must be understood to require a knowledge, and he shows no innocent knowledge, the inference remains of a guilty knowledge: from which it seems evident that shipping agency business cannot be safely undertaken, as has been heretofore done, at least for merchants residing in countries in which slave dealing still exists, not only in Africa, but Cuba, Brazils, the United States, and other places. But merchants in England are required to master the whole object and plan of their correspondents abroad; and that the sincerity of his endeavours will be measured only by the result, is what common prudence will teach a man to expect from the machinery which is set on foot in order to apply to this Act of Parliament that notable remark, that _who wills the end wills the means_.