I appeal to every man who reads my evidence before the Committee--without a previous determination to find out some one upon whom an experiment of the power of the Act of 5 Geo. IV may be tried, and a corroboration of the theory respecting the alleged existence of British slave trading--whether upon any other hypothesis, but that of conscious innocence or of consummate effrontery, my answers to the questions put by the Committee can be possibly reconciled with common sense or common prudence, much less be consistent with that deep skilfulness and far-seeing intelligence, which have been so lavishly attributed to me and to my partners for the purposes of my destruction. Not for an instant, even when those outraged feelings, which have not been spared, possessed greatest sway over my mind, has the thought occurred to me, that at the time of my examination the object of any one member of the Committee, or even of Captain Denman himself (for I have alluded to the fact of his being present), could be the collecting materials for a secret accusation before a Grand Jury; and I wish very distinctly to protest against any such inference being drawn from my remarks, not for the sake of the members of the Committee, who are above being injured by insinuations, but for my own sake, who alone could be injured by the supposition. I am conscious of having appeared before several men whose names are, and have been ever since I can recollect having heard them, associated in my mind with nothing but what is honourable and high principled: I received from some of them complimentary expressions upon the apparent candour and openness, the straightforward character of the evidence given; and I cannot help believing that my statements were considered moreover valuable, as tending to show the inexpediency, the gross injustice, of encouraging on the one hand trade with countries in which slave trade prevails, and yet, on the other hand, attempting to make the natural and well-known tendency of all trade to mix itself with the general state of society of the country into which it is carried, the evidence of some peculiar criminal knowledge in the parties necessarily nearest in contact with those countries, and visiting that knowledge upon them, after the community have derived profit and advantage from the transaction, although it is well known that the parties so to be sacrificed have it not in their power to guard any but themselves from being directly instrumental to the deviation of the trade into channels rendered illegal by Act of Parliament. I venture to assert, that the prominent feature of my evidence was felt by the Committee to be its _unconnectedness_ with any party or theory; and this feature stamped it with the character of truth which, if fairly and honestly stated, must at times militate against one theory or another.