e cargo on that coast, and also, that
the kidnapping of children was very prevalent there.

All these atrocities, he said, were fully substantiated by the evidence;
and here he should do injustice to his cause, if he were not to make a
quotation from the speech of Mr. B. Edwards in the Assembly of Jamaica,
who, though he was hostile to his propositions, had yet the candour to
deliver himself in the following manner there. "I am persuaded," says he,
"that Mr. Wilberforce has been rightly informed as to the manner in which
slaves are generally procured. The intelligence I have collected from my
own Negros abundantly confirms his account; and I have not the smallest
doubt, that in Africa the effects of this trade are precisely such as he
has represented them. The whole, or the greatest part, of that immense
continent is a field of warfare and desolation; a wilderness, in which the
inhabitants are wolves towards each other. That this scene of oppression,
fraud, treachery, and bloodshed, if not originally occasioned, is in part
(I will not say wholly) upheld by the Slave-trade, I dare not dispute.
Every man in the Sugar Islands may be convinced that it is so, who will
inquire of any African Negros, on their first arrival, concerning the
circumstances of their captivity. The assertion that it is otherwise, is
mockery and insult."

But it was not only by acts of outrage that the Africans were brought into
bondage. The very administration of justice was turned into an engine for
that end. The smallest offence was punished by a fine equal to the value of
a slave. Crimes were also fabricated; false accusations were resorted to;
and persons were sometimes employed to seduce the unwary into practices
with a view to the conviction and the sale of them.

It was another effect of this trade, that it corrupted the morals of those,
who carried it on. Every fraud was used to deceive the ignorance of the
natives by false weights and measures, adulterated commodities, and other
impositions of a like sort. These frauds were even acknowledged by many,
who had themselves practised them in obedience to the orders of their
superiors. For the honour of the mercantile character of the country, such
a traffic ought immediately to be suppressed.

Yet these things, however clearly proved by positive testimony, by the
concession of opponents, by particular inference, by general reasoning, by
the most authentic histories of Africa, by the experience