Page:Trials of the Slave Traders Samo, Peters and Tufft (1813).pdf/8

 clause.] Thus any person trading in any way in slaves, or aiding or abetting such traffic in any way, is considered a felon, and punished with fourteen years transportation, or to be kept at hard labour for five years; now these slave-factors are degraded to pickpockets and swindlers. But should this infernal commerce be continued; if mercenary miscreants can be found, whom fines, forfeitures, and infamy, cannot controul, whom no principle of morality, liberty, justice, humanity, or policy, can restrain, but that innumerable cruelties, multifarious casualties, and premature deaths, are still continued to be heaped on the unoffending sons of Africa; if those innocent human beings are still to be torn from their country, their habitations, their parents, children, and friends, for the miserable gratification of a little rum and tobacco; then I have no doubt the Almighty will continue the enlightened benevolence of England, and that an act will pass the British, legislature, considering the monsters what they really are, hostes humani generis, (much worse than pirates,) and authorize their being put to death wherever found, or to what nation soever they may belong; and even after this, they should be thankful that the law of England does not allow torture to be inflicted; for if the law of retaliation were let loose on them, their sufferings would be excessive and constant. It is the very essence of justice to apportion punishment to offence; and could the cargoes of slaves we have constantly exhibited in this colony, could the animated skeletons that are landed here, imploring death for relief, be visible in England, an universal exclamation would involuntarily burst from that inestimable people —“Without ocular demonstration, we could not have believed that human depravity could have extended to these enormities—extirpate these monsters!”

Gentlemen, you have a great duty to perform; England will look to you for its discharge; the happiness of