tour.

The reader can hardly conceive how my mind was agitated and distressed on
these different accounts. To have travelled more than two months, to have
seen many who could have materially served our cause, and to have lost most
of them, was very trying. And though it is true that I applied a remedy, I
was not driven to the adoption of it till I had performed more than half my
tour. Suffice it to say, that after having travelled upwards of sixteen
hundred miles backwards and forwards, and having conversed with forty-seven
persons, who were capable of promoting the cause by their evidence, I could
only prevail upon nine, by all the interest I could make, to be examined.

On my return to London, whither I had been called up by the committee to
take upon me the superintendence of the evidence, which the privy council
was now ready again to hear, I found my brother: he was then a young
officer in the navy; and as I knew he felt as warmly as I did in this great
cause, I prevailed upon him to go to Havre de Grace, the great slave-port
in France, where he might make his observations for two or three months,
and then report what he had seen and heard; so that we might have some one
to counteract any false statement of things which might be made relative to
the subject in that quarter.

At length the examinations were resumed, and with them the contest, in
which our own reputation and the fate of our cause were involved. The
committee for the abolition had discovered one or two willing evidences
during my absence, and Mr. Wilberforce, who was now recovered from his
severe indisposition, had found one or two others. These added to my own
made a respectable body: but we had sent no more than four or five of these
to the council when the King's illness unfortunately stopped our career.
For nearly five weeks between the middle of November and January the
examinations were interrupted or put off so that at the latter period we
began to fear that there would be scarcely time to hear the rest; for not
only the privy council report was to be printed, but the contest itself was
to be decided by the evidence contained in it, in the existing session.

The examinations, however, went on, but they went on only slowly, being
still subject to interruption from the same unfortunate cause. Among others
I offered my mite of information again. I wished the council to see more of
my African productions and manufactures, that they might really kn