had set west, and
Las Casas might as well have tried to stop the Trades. In 1800
Wilberforce stated in the House of Commons that at that time British
vessels were carrying each year to the Indies and the American
colonies 38,000 slaves, and when he spoke the traffic had been going
on for two hundred and fifty years. After the Treaty of Utrecht,
Queen Anne congratulated her Peers on the terms of the treaty which
gave to England "the fortress of Gibraltar, the Island of Minorca,
and the monopoly in the slave trade for thirty years," or, as it was
called, the _asiento_ (contract). This was considered so good an
investment that Philip V of Spain took up one-quarter of the common
stock, and good Queen Anne reserved another quarter, which later she
divided among her ladies. But for a time she and her cousin of Spain
were the two largest slave merchants in the world. The point of view
of those then engaged in the slave trade is very interesting. When
Queen Elizabeth sent Admiral Hawkins slave-hunting, she presented
him with a ship, named, with startling lack of moral perception,
after the Man of Sorrows. In a book on the slave trade I picked up
at Sierra Leone there is the diary of an officer who accompanied
Hawkins. "After," he writes, "going every day on shore to take the
inhabitants by burning and despoiling of their towns," the ship was
becalmed. "But," he adds gratefully, "the Almighty God, who never
suffereth his elect to perish, sent us the breeze."

The slave book shows that as late as 1780 others of the "elect" of
our own South were publishing advertisements like this, which is one
of the shortest and mildest. It is from a Virginia newspaper: "The
said fellow is outlawed, and I will give ten pounds reward for his
head severed from his body, or forty shillings if brought alive."

At about this same time an English captain threw overboard, chained
together, one hundred and thirty sick slaves. He claimed that had he
not done so the ship's company would have also sickened and died,
and the ship would have been lost, and that, therefore, the
insurance companies should pay for the slaves. The jury agreed with
him, and the Solicitor-General said: "What is all this declamation
about human beings! This is a case of chattels or goods. It is
really so--it is the case of throwing over goods. For the
purpose--the purpose of the insurance, they are goods and property;
whether right or wrong, we have nothing to do with it." In 180