Page:A memoir of Granville Sharp.djvu/10

6 his subsequent life were various; but an ardent love of holy and impartial liberty, always eminently distinguished him, and to the sufferers of wrong, he was invariably an active and disinterested friend.

At this time slavery had disgraced the British Colonies in America and in the West Indies, for two hundred years. The righteous laws of the empire, had been evaded or perverted; and opinion and precedent had been substituted for law. Rulers and people had bowed down to the abomination. The Church and the world had given it, their sanction. The most distinguished lawyers crouched beneath the lie, and the Lord Chief Justice of the day, affirmed its validity. Truth and love, religion and humanity, were trampled upon without remorse. The inalienable rights of man, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" were given to the winds; and Britain, boasting of her love for liberty, was a slave-mistress; a slave-dealer; and a carrier of slaves.

In the course of this hypocritical and ferocious system, the slave masters of the west, had long been in the habit of bringing over domestic slaves, to serve them, presuming that they could transfer their pirate-rights to England. But their poor slaves judged better. Every where, they heard the voice—every where, they saw the step of liberty—and they panted to be free. The voice of nature and of nature's God, in them, and in all around them, told them that they had as good a title to liberty as their masters had—and many a British heart, untainted by the prevailing wickedness, sympathized in their misery and burnt with the same healthful truth. But the slaveholders, revolted with indignation from the interference which thus arose with their tyrant powers, and exultingly spread the question, before the highest officers of the law. They had men to suit their purpose—York and Talbot, the Attorney and Solicitor General of the day, thoroughly imbued with the guilt of the day, recorded in 1729, the following infamous opinion:

"We are of opinion, that a slave coming from the West Indies into Great Britain or Ireland, either with or without