Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/257

 had in the year 1787 left the abolition to the colonial assemblies, it ought not to be taken out of their hands. This great event, he observed, could only be accomplished in two ways; either by the assemblies, or by the parliament of England. Now the members of the assembly of Jamaica had professed that they would never abolish the trade. Was it not therefore idle to rely upon them for the accomplishment of it? He then took a very comprehensive view of the arguments which had been offered in the course of the debate, and was severe upon the planters in the house, who, he said, had brought into familiar use certain expressions with no other view than to throw a veil over their odious system. Among these was their right to import laborers. But never was the word "laborers" so prostituted as when it was used for slaves. Never was the word "right" so prostituted, not even when The Rights of Man were talked of, as when the right to trade in man's blood was asserted by the members of an enlightened assembly. Never was the right of importing these laborers worse defended than when the antiquity of the slave-trade, and its foundation on ancient acts of parliament, were brought forward in its support. We had been cautioned not to lay our unhallowed hands on the ancient institution of the slave-trade; nor to subvert a fabric raised by the wisdom of our ancestors, and consecrated by a lapse of ages. But on what principles did we usually respect the institutions of antiquity? We respected them when we saw some shadow of departed worth and usefulness, or some memorial of what had been creditable to mankind. But was this the case with the slavetrade? Had it begun in principles of justice or national honor, which the changes of the world alone had impaired? Had it to plead former services and glories in behalf of its present disgrace? In looking at it we saw nothing but crimes and sufferings from the beginning; nothing but what wounded and convulsed our feelings; nothing but what excited indignation and horror. It had not even to plead what could often be said in favor of the most unjustifiable wars. Though conquest had sometimes originated in ambition, and in the worst of motives, yet the conquerors and the conquered were sometimes blended afterwards into one people; so that a system of common interest arose out of former differences. But where was the analogy of the cases? Was it only at the outset that we could trace violence and injustice on the part of the slave-trade? "Were the oppressors and the oppressed so reconciled that enmities ultimately ceased? No. Was it reasonable, then, to urge a prescriptive right, not to the fruits of an ancient and forgotten evil, but to a series of new violences; to a chain of fresh enormities; to cruelties continually repeated; and of which every instance inflicted a fresh calamity, and constituted a separate and substantial crime?

The debate being over, the house divided; when it appeared that there were for Mr. Wilberforce's motion seventy-four, but against it eighty-two.

The question had cow been tried and lost in almost every possible shape, but Mr. Wilberforce and the committee resolved to hold themselves in readiness to seize the first favorable opportunity which should present itself of furthering the cause. Four ears passed over without action, but the year 1804