Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/211

 ordinary families, afforded other resources for this purpose. But granting that all these suppositions should be unfounded, and that every one of these substitutes should fail for a time, the planters would be indemnified, as is the case in all transactions of commerce, by the increased price of their produce in the British market. Thus, by contending against the abolition, they were defeated in every part of the argument. But he would never give up the point, that [he number of slaves could be kept up by natural population, and without any dependence whatever on the slave-trade. He therefore called upon the house again. to abolish it as a criminal waste of life; it was utterly unnecessary; he had proved it so by documents contained in the report. The merchants of Liverpool, indeed, had thought otherwise, but he should be cautious how he assented to their opinions. They declared last year that it was a losing trade at two slaves to a ton, and yet they pursued it when restricted to five slaves to three tons. he believed, however, that it was upon the whole a losing concern; in the same manner as the lottery would be a losing adventure to any company who should buy all the tickets. Here and there an individual gained a large prize, but the majority of adventurers gained nothing. The same merchants, too, had asserted that the town of Liverpool would be ruined by the abolition. But Liverpool did not depend for its consequence upon the slave-trade. The whole export tonnage from that place amounted to no less than 170,000 tons, whereas the export part of it to Africa amounted only to 13,000. Liverpool, he was sure, owed its greatness to other and very different causes; the slave-trade bearing but a small proportion to its other trades. Having gone through that part of the subject which related to the slaves, he would now answer two objections which he had frequently heard started. The first of these was, that the abolition of the slave-trade would operate to the total ruin of our navy, and to the increase of that of our rivals. For an answer to these assertions, he referred to what he considered to be the most valuable part of the report, and for which the house and the country were indebted to the indefatigable exertions of Mr. Clarkson. By the report, it appeared that instead of the slave-trade being a nursery for British seamen, it was their grave. It appeared that more seamen died in that trade in one year than in the whole remaining trade of the country in two. Out of 910 sailors in it, 216 died in the year, while upon a fair average of the same number of men employed in the trades to the East and West Indies, Petersburgh, Newfoundland, and Greenland, no more than 87 died. It appeared also, that out of 3,170, who had left Liverpool in the slave-ships in the year 1787, only 1,428 had returned. And here, while he lamented the loss which the country thus annually sustained in her seamen, he had additionally to lament the barbarous usage which they experienced, and which this trade, by the natural tendency to harden the heart, exclusively produced. He would just read an extract of a letter from Governor Parry, of Barbadoes, to Lord Sydney, one of the secretaries of state. The governor declared that he could no longer contain himself on account of the ill treatment which the British sailors endured at the hands of their savage captains These were obliged to have