Gracious God! how wicked, how beyond all example impious, must be that servitude, which cannot be carried on without the continual murder of so many and innocent persons!  What punishment is not to be expected for such monstrous and unparalleled barbarities!  For if the blood of one man, unjustly shed, cries with so loud a voice for the divine vengeance, how shall the cries and groans of an hundred thousand men, annually murdered, ascend the celestial mansions, and bring down that punishment, which such enormities deserve!  But do we mention punishment?  Do we allude to that punishment, which shall be inflicted on men as individuals, in a future life?  Do we allude to that awful day, which shall surely come, when the master shall behold his murdered negroe face to face?  When a train of mutilated slaves shall be brought against him?  When he shall stand confounded and abashed?  Or, do we allude to that punishment, which may be inflicted on them here, as members of a wicked community?  For as a body politick, if its members are ever so numerous, may be considered as an whole, acting of itself, and by itself, in all affairs in which it is concerned, so it is accountable, as such, for its conduct; and as these kinds of polities have only their existence here, so it is only in this world, that, as such, they can be punished.

“Now, whether we consider the crime, with respect to the individuals immediately concerned in this most barbarous and cruel traffick, or whether we consider it as patronized[115] and encouraged by the laws of the land, it presents to our view an equal degree of enormity.  A crime, founded on a dreadful pre-eminence in wickedness,—­a crime, which being both of individuals and the nation, must sometime draw down upon us the heaviest judgment of Almighty God, who made of one blood all the sons of men, and who gave to all equally a natural right to liberty; and who, ruling all the kingdoms of the earth with equal providential justice, cannot suffer such deliberate, such monstrous iniquity, to pass long unpunished[116].”

But alas! he seems already to have interfered on the occasion!  The violent[117] and supernatural agitations of all the elements, which, for a series of years, have prevailed in those European settlements, where the unfortunate Africans are retained in a state of slavery, and which have brought unspeakable calamities on the inhabitants, and publick losses on the states to which they severally belong, are so many awful visitations of God for this inhuman violation of his laws.  And it is not perhaps unworthy of remark, that as the subjects of Great-Britain have two thirds of this impious commerce in their own hands, so they have suffered[118] in the same proportion, or more severely than the rest.