by endeavours to pick them up; the dying and the dead strew the deck; women giving birth to the fruit of the womb, amidst the corpses of their husbands and their children; and other, yet worse and nameless atrocities, fill up the terrible picture, of impotent justice and triumphant guilt.  But the guilt is not all Spanish and Portuguese.  The English Government can enforce its demands on the puny cabinets of Madrid and Lisbon, scarce conscious of a substantive existence, in all that concerns our petty interests:  wherever justice and mercy to mankind demand our interference, there our voice sinks within us, and no sound is uttered.  That any treaty without an outfit clause should be suffered to exist between powers so situated, is an outrage upon all justice, all reason, all common sense.  But one thing is certain, that unless we are to go further, we have gone too far, and must in mercy to hapless Africa retrace our steps.  Unless we really put the traffic down with a strong hand, and instantly, we must instantly repeal the treaties that pretended to abolish it, for these exacerbate the evil a hundred fold, and are ineffectual to any one purpose but putting money into the pockets of our men of war.  The fact is as unquestionable, as it is appalling, that all our anxious endeavours to extinguish the Foreign Slave Trade, have ended in making it incomparably worse than it was before we pretended to put it down; that owing to our efforts, there are thrice the number of slaves yearly torn from Africa; and that wholly because of our efforts, two thirds of these are murdered on the high seas and in the holds of the pirate vessels.

It is said, that when these scenes were described to an indignant nation last session of Parliament, the actual effects of this bad system were denied, though its tendency could not be disputed.

It was averred that “no British seaman could be capable of neglecting his duty for the sake of increasing the gains of the station.”  But nothing could be more absurd than this.  Can the direct and inevitable tendency of the head-money system be doubted?  Are cruisers the only men over whom motives have no influence?  Then why offer a reward at all?  When they want no stimulus to perform their duty, why tell them that if the ship is empty, they get a hundred pounds:  if laden, five thousand?  They know the rules of arithmetic;—­they understand the force of numbers.  But, in truth, there is not an individual on all the coast of Africa who will be misled by such appeals, or suffer all this to divert them from their purpose of denouncing the system.  There are persons high in rank among the best servants of the crown, who know the facts from their own observations, and who are ready to bear witness to the truth, in spite of all the attempts that have been made to silence them.