cticable."[160]

Wilberforce had already found that the English merchants were still less
manageable. Pitt had entered so fully into his views, that in 1788 he
himself moved and carried a resolution pledging the House of Commons to
take the slave-trade into consideration in the next session. And another
friend of the cause, Sir W. Dobben, brought in a bill to diminish the
horrors of the middle passage by proportioning the number of slaves who
might be conveyed in one ship to the tonnage of the vessel. But those
concerned in the West India trade rose up in arms against even so
moderate a measure, and one so clearly demanded by the most ordinary
humanity as this. The Liverpool merchants declared that the absence of
restrictions on the slave-trade had been the chief cause of the
prosperity and opulence of their town, and obtained leave to be heard by
counsel against the bill. But Fox united with Pitt on this subject, and
the bill was carried. But this was all the practical success which the
efforts of the "Abolitionists," as they began to be called, achieved for
many years. And even that was not won without extreme difficulty; Lord
Chancellor Thurlow opposing it with great vehemence in the House of
Lords, as the fruit of a "five days' fit of philanthropy which had just
sprung up," and pointing to the conduct of the French government, which,
as he asserted, had offered premiums to encourage the trade, as an
example that we should do well to follow. It was even said that he had
contrived to incline the King himself to the same view; to have
persuaded him that the trade was indispensable to the prosperity of our
manufacturers, and, in the Chancellor's words, "that it was his royal
duty to show some humanity to the whites as well as to the negroes." And
more than once, when bills to limit or wholly suppress the trade had
been passed by the Commons, the same mischievous influence defeated them
in the Lords. The last years of Pitt's first administration were too
fully occupied with the affairs of Ireland, negotiations with foreign
powers, and the great war with France, to enable him to keep pace with
his friend's zeal on the subject. But in his second administration,
occupied though he was with a recurrence of the same causes, he found
time to prepare and issue an Order in Council prohibiting the
importation of slaves into our fresh colonial acquisitions, and the
employment of British ships to supply the Dutch, French, and Spanis