These circumstances occasioned one or two persons to
attempt to answer it, and these answers brought Mr. Ramsay into the
first controversy ever entered into on this subject, during which, as is
the case in most controversies, the cause of truth was spread.
The works which Mr. Ramsay wrote upon this subject were, the essay just
mentioned, in 1784. _An Inquiry_, also, _into the Effects of the
Abolition of the Slave Trade_, in 1784; _A Reply to Personal Invectives
and Objections_, in 1785; _A Letter to James Tobin, Esq._, in 1787;
_Objections to the Abolition of the Slave Trade, with Answers_; and _An
Examination of Harris's Scriptural Researches on the Licitness of the
Slave Trade_, in 1788; and _An Address on the proposed Bill for the
Abolition of the Slave Trade_, in 1789. In short, from the time when he
first took up the cause, he was engaged in it till his death, which was
not a little accelerated by his exertions. He lived, however, to see
this cause in a train of parliamentary inquiry, and he died satisfied;
being convinced, as he often expressed, that the investigation must
inevitably lead to the total abolition of the Slave Trade.
In the next year, that is, in the year 1785, another advocate was seen
in Monsieur Necker, in his celebrated work on the _French Finances_,
which had just been translated into the English language from the
original work, in 1784.
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