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Rh King Ferdinand ordered a number of Africans to be sent to that colony for the working of the mines.

Before this time Columbus had proposed an exchange of his Carib prisoners as slaves against live stock to be furnished to Haiti by Spanish merchants. He actually sent home, in 1494, above 500 Indian prisoners taken in wars with the caciques, who, he suggested, might be sold as slaves at Seville. But, after a royal order had been issued for their sale, Queen Isabella, interested by what she had heard of the gentle and hospitable character of the natives and of their docility, procured a letter to be written to Bishop Fonseca, the superintendent of Indian affairs, suspending the order until inquiry should be made into the causes for which they had been made prisoners, and into the lawfulness of their sale. Theologians differed on the latter question, and Isabella directed that these Indians should be sent back to their native country.

Bartolome de las Casas, the celebrated bishop of Chiapa, accompanied Ovando to Haiti, and was a witness of the cruelties from which the Indians suffered under his administra- tion. He came to Spain in 1517 to obtain measures in their favour, and he then made the suggestion to Charles that each Spanish resident in Haiti should have licence to import a dozen negro slaves. Las Casas, in his Historia de las Indias (lib. iii. cap. 101), confesses the error into which he thus fell. Other good men appear to have given similar advice about the same time, and, as has been shown, the practice was not absolutely new; indeed the young king had in 1516, whilst still in Flanders, granted licences to his courtiers for the importation of negroes into the colonies, though Jimenes, as regent of Castile, by a decree of the same year forbade the practice. The suggestion of Las Casas was no doubt made on the ground that the negroes could, better than the Indians, bear the labour in the mines, which was rapidly exhausting the numbers of the latter. He has sometimes on this plea been exonerated from all censure; but, though entitled to honour for the zeal which he showed on behalf of the natives, he must bear the blame for his violation or neglect of moral principle. His advice was unfortunately adopted. “Charles,” says Robertson, “granted a patent to one of his Flemish favourites, containing an exclusive right” of supplying 4000 negroes annually to Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica and Porto Rico. “The favourite sold his patent to some Genoese merchants for 25,000 ducats”; these merchants obtained the slaves from the Portuguese; and thus was first systematized the slave trade between Africa and America.

Movement against the Slave Trade.—When the nature of the slave trade began to be understood by the public, all that was best in England was adverse to it. Among those who denounced it—besides some whose names are now little known, but are recorded in the pages of Clarkson—were Baxter, Sir Richard Steele (in Inkle and Yarico), the poets Southern (in Oroonoko), Pope, Thomson, Shenstone, Dyer, Savage and above all Cowper (see his Charity, and Task, bk. 3), Thomas Day (author of Sandford and Merton), Sterne, Warburton, Hutcheson, Beattie, John Wesley, Whitfield, Adam Smith, Millar, Robertson, Dr Johnson, Paley, Gregory, Gilbert Wakefield, Bishop Porteus, Dean Tucker. The question of the legal existence of slavery in Great Britain and Ireland was raised in consequence of an opinion given in 1729 by Yorke and, Talbot, attorney-general and solicitor-general at the time, to the effect that a slave by coming into those countries from the West Indies did not become free, and might be compelled by his master to return to the plantations. Chief-Justice Holt had expressed, a contrary opinion; and the matter was brought to,, a final issue by Granville Sharp in the case of the negro Somerset! Jt was decided by Lord Mansfield, in the name of the whole bench, on the 22nd of June 1772, that as soon as a slave set his foot on the soil of the British islands he became free. In 1776 it was moved in the House of Commons by David Hartley, son of the author of Observations on Man, that; “the slave trade was contrary to the laws of God and the rights of men”; but this motion—the first which was made on the subject—failed.

The first persons in England who took united practical action against the slave trade were the Quakers, following the expression of sentiment which had emanated so early as 1671 from their founder George Fox. In 1727 they declared it to be “not a commendable or allowed” practice; in 1761 they excluded from their society all who should be found concerned in it, and issued appeals to their members and the public against the system. In 1783 there was formed among them, an association “for the relief and liberation of the negro slaves in the West