I can hardly restrain the expression of my feelings when I consider now the use which has been made of the unreserved frankness, the unguarded, because unsuspecting, candour of the statements made by me before that Committee. The thought never occurred to me, that evidence, professedly taken for the benefit of the public service, required any thing more than substantive truth, and a general bearing upon the points in question; nor could I ever have conceived that it would be scanned with critical severity, in order to take advantage to my detriment of the worst construction that might be put upon this or that verbal slip, so as to place my very existence at stake upon it. I considered myself as doing nothing more than (whilst attempting to eradicate from the minds of the Committee any unfavourable impression, which might have been made upon them by incorrect statements against the character of my house) affording information for placing the legislation on the subjects before the consideration of the Committee on a more satisfactory basis--not by indulging in assertion of crude theories, or in vague declamations, but by the simple statement of a practical case--anxious to show in the instance of my house the situation in which a firm of acknowledged honour and respectability, whose private character, and the prominent political position of one of its members in another country, renders them at least very unlikely abettors of the slave trade--may yet be placed, because, living in England, they happen to have a mercantile intercourse with persons residing in places where this trade is unhappily one of the existing evils, and in which therefore those persons may be more or less implicated, inasmuch as it is well known that no trade whatever can be carried on with a country where the slave trade exists without its being, in some measure, of more or less direct assistance to this illicit traffic. And as the assertion which had been made against some of our correspondents tended, if true, to place this position of merchants in England in a very striking light, I did think that whilst the statements made _might_ be true (and to disprove them could not be in my power nor in the power of any man in my situation) the proper and fair course was not to controvert the matter at all; but, taking the statements for granted, practically to direct the attention of the Committee to the position in which British merchants are left upon the very case itself, which was made out by the bitterest impugners of the character of British commerce.