Page:A memoir of Granville Sharp.djvu/19

Rh he filled a government situation and was dependant for his present subsistence, and for his future prospects in life, upon the Ministry of the day. The tract above mentioned as having lately been printed in Philadelphia, was from the pen of the excellent Anthony Benezet, a brother in heart and in deed of Granville Sharp.

On 9th May, the trial of Somerset's case, was resumed. Mr. Mansfield conducted the defence. He contended, that "If Somerset was a man—and he should conclude him one, till proved otherwise—he could not be a slave in England. The dispute," he said, "was between one human creature and another, the master and the negro, whether the latter was entitled to the important rights which nature had given him. To the charge that he was a slave, the negro might very well answer, 'True, I was a slave; torn from my mother's arms, I was put in chains on board a British ship and carried to America—I was there placed under a master, from whose tyranny, I could not escape: if I had attempted it, I should have been exposed to the severest punishment; and never from the first moment of my life to the present time, have I been in a situation to assert the common rights of mankind. I am now in a country where the rights of liberty are known and regarded; and can you tell me the reason, why I am not to be protected by those laws?' To have such a question answered," continued Mr. Mansfield, "consistently with those laws, seems to me impossible—for, on the contrary, he is as fully and clearly entitled to the protection of those laws, as any one who now hears me."

At the end of Mr. Mansfield's speech, the case was adjourned to the 14th May. Mr. Hargrave then proceeded with the defence. "If," said he, "the claim of Stewart over Somerset, be here recognized, domestic slavery, with its horrid train of evils, may be lawfully imported into this country, at the discretion of every foreigner or native. It will come, not only from our own Colonies, but from Poland, Russia, Spain and Turkey—from the coast of Barbary; from the eastern and western coasts of Africa; from every part of