The next class of the forerunners and coadjutors, up to the year 1787, will consist, first, of the Quakers in America; and then of others, as they were united to these for the same object.

It may be asked, How the Quakers living there should have become forerunners and coadjutors in the great work now under our consideration.  I reply, first, that it was an object for many years with these to do away the Slave Trade as it was carried on in their own ports.  But this trade was conducted in part, both before and after the independence of America, by our own countrymen.  It was, secondly, an object with these to annihilate slavery in America; and this they have been instruments in accomplishing to a considerable extent.  But any abolition of slavery within given boundaries must be a blow to the Slave Trade there.  The American Quakers, lastly, living in a land where both the commerce and slavery existed, were in the way of obtaining a number of important facts relative to both, which made for their annihilation; and communicating many of these facts to those in England, who espoused the same cause, they became fellow-labourers with these in producing the event in question.

The Quakers in America, it must be owned, did most of them originally as other settlers there with respect to the purchase of slaves.  They had lands without a sufficient number of labourers, and families without a sufficient number of servants, for their work.  Africans were poured in to obviate these difficulties, and these were bought promiscuously by all.  In these days, indeed, the purchase of them was deemed favourable to both parties, for there was little or no knowledge of the manner in which they had been procured as slaves.  There was no charge of inconsistency on this account, as in later times.  But though many of the Quakers engaged, without their usual consideration, in purchases of this kind, yet those constitutional principles, which belong to the society, occasioned the members of it in general to treat those whom they purchased with great tenderness, considering them, though of a different colour, as brethren, and as persons for whose spiritual welfare it became them to be concerned; so that slavery, except as to the power legally belonging to it, was in general little more than servitude in their hands.

This treatment, as it was thus mild on the continent of America where the members of this society were the owners of slaves, so it was equally mild in The West India Islands where they had a similar property.  In the latter countries, however, where only a few of them lived, it began soon to be productive of serious consequences; for it was so different from that which the rest of the inhabitants considered to be proper, that the latter became alarmed at it.  Hence in Barbados an act was passed in 1676, under Governor Atkins, which was entitled, An Act to prevent the people called Quakers from bringing their Negroes into their meetings for worship, though they held these