would be influenced by any regulations made in this country, to refuse to purchase those who had not been fairly, honestly, and uprightly enslaved?  They who were offered to us for sale were brought, some of them, three or four thousand miles, and exchanged like cattle from one hand to another, till they reached the coast.  But who could return these to their homes, or make them compensation for their sufferings during their long journeyings?  He would now conclude by begging pardon of the house for having detained them so long.  He could indeed have expressed his own conviction in fewer words.  He needed only to have made one or two short statements, and to have quoted the commandment, “Thou shalt do no murder.”  But he thought it his duty to lay the whole of the case, and the whole of its guilt, before them.  They would see now that no mitigations, no palliatives, would either be efficient or admissible.  Nothing short of an absolute abolition could be adopted.  This they owed to Africa:  they owed it, too, to their own moral characters.  And he hoped they would follow up the principle of one of the repentant African captains, who had gone before the committee of privy council as a voluntary witness, and that they would make Africa all the atonement in their power for the multifarious injuries she had received at the hands of British subjects.  With respect to these injuries, their enormity and extent, it might be alleged in their excuse, that they were not fully acquainted with them till that moment, and therefore not answerable for their former existence:  but now they could no longer plead ignorance concerning them.  They had seen them brought directly before their eyes, and they must decide for themselves, and must justify to the world and their own consciences the facts and principles upon which their decision was formed.

Mr. Wilberforce having concluded his speech, which lasted three hours and a half, read, and laid on the table of the house, as subjects for their future discussion, twelve propositions, which he had deduced from the evidence contained in the privy council report, and of which the following is the abridged substance: 

1.  That the number of slaves annually carried from the coast of Africa, in British vessels, was about 38,000, of which, on an average, 22,500 were carried to the British islands, and that of the latter only 17,500 were retained there.

2.  That these slaves, according to the evidence on the table, consisted, First, of prisoners of war; Secondly, of free persons sold for debt, or on account of real or imputed crimes, particularly adultery and witchcraft; in which cases they were frequently sold with their whole families, and sometimes for the profit of those by whom they were condemned; Thirdly, of domestic slaves sold for the profit of their masters, in some places at the will of the masters, and in others, on being condemned by them for real or imputed crimes; Fourthly, of persons made slaves by various acts of oppression, violence, or fraud, committed either by the princes and chiefs of those countries on their subjects, or by private individuals on each other;—­or, lastly, by Europeans engaged in this traffic.