e, "if you were in the same condition
as the poor Africans are--who came strangers to you, and were sold to
you as slaves--I say, if this should be the condition of you or yours,
you would think it a hard measure; yea, and very great bondage and
cruelty. And, therefore, consider seriously of this; and do you for them
and to them, as you would willingly have them, or any others, do unto
you, were you in the like slavish condition, and bring them to know the
Lord Christ." And in his Journal, speaking of the advice which he gave
his friends at Barbados, he says, "I desired also that they would cause
their overseers to deal mildly and gently with their negroes, and not to
use cruelty towards them, as the manner of some had been, and that after
certain years of servitude they should make them free."

William Edmundson, who was a minister of the society, and, indeed, a
fellow-traveller with George Fox, had the boldness in the same island to
deliver his sentiments to the governor on the same subject. Having been
brought before him and accused of making the Africans Christians, or, in
other words, of making them rebel and destroy their owners, he replied,
"That it was a good thing to bring them to the knowledge of God and
Christ Jesus, and to believe in him who died for them and all men, and
that this would keep them from rebelling, or cutting any person's
throat; but if they did rebel and cut their throats, as the governor
insinuated they would, it would be their own doing, in keeping them in
ignorance and under oppression, in giving them liberty to be common with
women like brutes, and, on the other hand, in starving them for want of
meat and clothes convenient; thus, giving them liberty in that which God
restrained, and restraining them in that which was meat and clothing."

I do not find any individual of this society moving in this cause, for
some time after the death of George Fox and William Edmundson. The first
circumstance of moment which I discover, is a resolution of the whole
Society on the subject, at their yearly meeting, held in London in the
year 1727. The resolution was contained in the following words:--"It is
the sense of this meeting, that the importing of negroes from their
native country and relations by Friends is not a commendable nor allowed
practice, and is, therefore, censured by this meeting."

In the year 1758, the Quakers thought it their duty, as a body, to pass
another resolution upon this subje