This petition was presented by the Honourable Ann Poulet, and Alexander Hood, Esq., (afterwards Lord Bridport,) who were the members for the town of Bridgewater.  It was ordered to lie on the table.  The answer which these gentlemen gave to their constituents relative to the reception of it in the House of Commons is worthy of notice:—­“There did not appear,” say they in their common letter, “the least disposition to pay any further attention to it.  Every one almost says that the abolition of the Slave Trade must immediately throw the West Indian islands into convulsions, and soon complete their utter ruin.  Thus they will not trust Providence for its protection for so pious an undertaking.”

In the year 1786, Captain J.S.  Smith, of the royal navy, offered himself to the notice of the public in behalf of the African cause.  Mr. Ramsay, as I have observed before, had become involved in a controversy in consequence of his support of it.  His opponents not only attacked his reputation, but had the effrontery to deny his facts.  This circumstance occasioned Captain Smith to come forward.  He wrote a letter to his friend Mr. Hill, in which he stated that he had seen those things, while in the West Indies, which Mr. Ramsay had asserted to exist, but which had been so boldly denied.  He gave, also, permission to Mr. Hill to publish this letter.  Too much praise cannot be bestowed on Captain Smith, for thus standing forth in a noble cause, and in behalf of an injured character.

The last of the necessary forerunners and coadjutors of this class, whom I am to mention, was our much-admired poet, Cowper; and a great coadjutor he was, when we consider what value was put upon his sentiments, and the extraordinary circulation of his works.  There are few persons who have not been properly impressed by the following lines:—­

     My ear is pain’d,
  My soul is sick with every day’s report,
  Of wrong and outrage with which earth is fill’d. 
  There is no flesh in man’s obdurate heart,
  It does not feel for man.  The natural bond
  Of brotherhood is sever’d as the flax
  That falls asunder at the touch of fire. 
  He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
  Not colour’d like his own, and having power
  To inforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause
  Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey. 
  Lands intersected by a narrow frith
  Abhor each other.  Mountains interpos’d,
  Make enemies of nations, who had else,
  Like kindred drops been mingled into one. 
  Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys;
  And, worse than all, and most to be deplored
  As human Nature’s broadest, foulest blot,—­
  Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat
  With stripes, that Mercy with a bleeding heart
  Weeps, when she sees inflicted on a beast. 
  Then what is man?  And what man, seeing this,
  And having human feelings, does not blush
  And hang his head to think himself a man?