thousand miles.  In various lines or paths formed at right angles from the shore, and passing into the heart of the country, slaves were procured and brought down.  The distance, which many of them travelled, was immense.  Those, who have been in Africa, have assured us, that they came as far as from the sources of their largest rivers, which we know to be many hundred miles inland, and the natives have told us, in their way of computation, that they came a journey of many moons.

It must strike us again, that the misery and the crimes, included in the evil, as it has been shown in the transportation, had no ordinary bounds.  They were not to be seen in the crossing of a river, but of an ocean.  They did not begin in the morning and end at night, but were continued for many weeks, and sometimes by casualties for a quarter of the year.  They were not limited to the precincts of a solitary ship, but were spread among many vessels; and these were so constantly passing, that the ocean itself never ceased to be a witness of their existence.

And it must strike us, finally, that the misery and crimes, included in the evil as it has been found in foreign lands, were not confined within the shores of a little island.  Most of the islands of a continent, and many of these of considerable population and extent, were filled with them.  And the continent itself, to which these geographically belong, was widely polluted by their domain.  Hence, if we were to take the vast extent of space occupied by these crimes and sufferings from the heart of Africa to its shores, and that which they filled on the continent of America and the islands adjacent, and were to join the crimes and sufferings in one to those in the other, by the crimes and sufferings which took place in the track of the vessels successively crossing the Atlantic, we should behold a vast belt as it were of physical and moral evil, reaching through land and ocean to the length of nearly half the circle of the globe.

The next view which I shall take of this evil will be as it relates to the difficulty of subduing it.

This difficulty may be supposed to have been more than ordinarily great.  Many evils of a public nature, which existed in former times, were the offspring of ignorance and superstition, and they were subdued of course by the progress of light and knowledge.  But the evil in question began in avarice.  It was nursed also by worldly interest.  It did not therefore so easily yield to the usual correctives of disorders in the world.  We may observe also, that the interest by which it was thus supported, was not that of a few individuals, nor of one body, but of many bodies of men.  It was interwoven again into the system of the commerce and of the revenue of nations.  Hence the merchant—­the planter—­the mortgagee—­the manufacturer—­the politician—­the legislator—­the cabinet-minister—­lifted up their voices against the annihilation of it.  For these reasons,