Page:Copley 1844 A History of Slavery and its Abolition 2nd Ed.djvu/336

318 first, but for the misrepresentations and falsehoods of those engaged in them. The governments of Europe were made to believe that the Africans voluntarily quitted their own land for their own benefit, and that those who conveyed them were actuated by a benevolent desire and intention to better their circumstances, and to instruct them in the christian religion. It is, therefore, a well authenticated fact in history, that the original government grants and permission had their origin in fraud and falsehood; and if the premises fall, all conclusions and concessions grounded on them must fall too. Then as to charters—slavery had indeed been upheld and kept together by the laws which those charters gave the colonists the power to make: that very slavery, nevertheless, was illegal, for in all the charters it was expressed that the laws and statutes to be made under them must not be repugnant but conformable to the laws of Great Britain. We all know, by our happy experience, that Great Britain has no law which will sanction the sale of a human being; the forcing another to work without wages and without choice of his master; or the punishment of one human being at the caprice of another. Indeed, the very slave-holders themselves admitted, that, if debarred of whatever was repugnant to the laws of England, they did not see how they could have any title to their slaves likely to be supported by the laws of England. In fact, the colonial system was at constant variance with the whole spirit and letter of the English constitution.

Mr. Clarkson then urges the obligation to release these slaves, not when it is convenient to Britain to spare them, but when they can be