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 two years previously "to all British subjects," and a swarm of speculators competed to meet the ever-increasing demand from the American plantations, which were now yielding enormous quantities of tropical produce, thanks entirely to this African slave labour. The risks for those engaged in the actual operations were not inconsiderable: but the profits were correspondingly large. Thenceforth the slave trade "occupied the very foremost part in English policy," and became a predominant concern of our foreign policy. This was clearly shown in the Treaty of Utrecht which closed, in 1713, the needlessly prolonged war of the Spanish Succession in which England, Austria, and the United Netherlands opposed Louis XIV. and Philip V. The part of the Treaty which gave "unqualified and unanimous satisfaction at home" was the "Assiento" compact, whereby England secured from Philip, in accordance with the practice of the Spanish Sovereigns referred to above, an "absolute monopoly of the supply of slaves to the Spanish Colonies." The monopoly was conferred by the British Government upon the South Sea Company. The "immense amount of guilty wealth acquired through the 'Assiento' Treaty did much to compensate for the great pecuniary sacrifices of the war." The generation which concluded it came to regard the "extension of the slave trade as a capital object of English commercial policy," and it became the "main object" of national policy to "encourage the kidnapping of tens of thousands of negroes and their consignment to the most miserable slavery." In fact the Peace which brought a precarious and short-lived truce to Europe, brought war, war of the most atrocious and desolating character, and on a scale until then unimagined, to Africa, and "made of England the great slave trader of the world."

The tradition persisted all through the century. Chatham made the development of the trade a main object of his policy, and "boasted that his conquests in Africa had placed almost the whole slave trade in British hands." Even Pitt, after the war with France which broke French sea-power, annihilated the French slave trade, shattered the French Colonial Empire and made us its heirs, went back upon the position he had precedently assumed [under the influence of Wilberforce] in the teeth of the opposition of three of his colleagues