Page:Substance of the speech of His Royal Highness the Duke of Clarence, in the House of Lords.djvu/29

 territory, was not able to distinguish the Freeman from the Slave.

I do not wish to make any wrong impression on the minds of your Lordships; but a man less suspicious than myself might have good grounds for insinuating, that some Members of the Sierra Leone Company view, with an envious eye, the advantageous traffic now carried on between the African and British Trader. If the grand object of the Sierra Leone Company, like every other Commercial Association, be gain rather than loss, I have a right to think that some of the Members lament their exclusion from the Slave Trade. If there be no cause for this suspicion, why molest and annoy the British Trader in the exercise of that traffic sanctioned for such a long series of years by custom and by Parliament? Surveying the subject in this view, I have a right to maintain, that the British Legislature, on the passing of the Act for Incorporating and Establishing the Sierra