a confidence in this persuasion, and took the resolution to act upon it.  Light, indeed, soon broke in upon him.  The suspicion of his mind was every day confirmed by increasing information, and the evidence he had now to offer upon this point was decisive and complete.  The principle upon which he founded the necessity of the abolition was not policy, but justice:  but though justice were the principle of the measure, yet he trusted he should distinctly prove it to be reconcilable with our truest political interest.

In the first place, he asserted that the number of the slaves in our West India islands might be kept up without the introduction of recruits from Africa; and to prove this, he would enumerate the different sources of their mortality.  The first was the disproportion of the sexes, there being, upon an average, about five males imported to three females:  but this evil, when the Slave Trade was abolished, would cure itself.  The second consisted in the bad condition in which they were brought to the islands, and the methods of preparing them for sale.  They arrived frequently in a sickly and disordered state, and then they were made up for the market by the application of astringents, washes, mercurial ointments, and repelling drugs, so that their wounds and diseases might be hid.  These artifices were not only fraudulent but fatal; but these, it was obvious, would of themselves fall with the trade.  A third was, excessive labour joined with improper food; and a fourth was, the extreme dissoluteness of their manners.  These, also, would both of them be counteracted by the impossibility of getting further supplies:  for owners, now unable to replace those slaves whom they might lose, by speedy purchases in the markets, would be more careful how they treated them in future, and a better treatment would be productive of better morals.  And here he would just advert to an argument used against those who complained of cruelty in our islands, which was, that it was the interest of masters to treat their slaves with humanity:  but surely it was immediate and present, not future and distant interest, which was the great spring of action in the affairs of mankind.  Why did we make laws to punish men?  It was their interest to be upright and virtuous:  but there was a present impulse continually breaking in upon their better judgment, and an impulse, which was known to be contrary to their permanent advantage.  It was ridiculous to say that men would be bound by their interest, when gain or ardent passion urged them.  It might as well be asserted, that a stone could not be thrown into the air, or a body move from place to place, because the principle of gravitation bound them to the surface of the earth.  If a planter in the West Indies found himself reduced in his profits, he did not usually dispose of any part of his slaves; and his own gratifications were never given up, so long as there was a possibility of making any retrenchment