But in the lapse of a long
series of years, by a progression slow, and for a time almost
imperceptible, we had become rich in a variety of acquirements. We were
favoured above measure in the gifts of Providence, we were unrivalled in
commerce, pre-eminent in arts, foremost in the pursuits of philosophy
and science, and established in all the blessings of civil society; we
were in the possession of peace, of liberty, and of happiness; we were
under the guidance of a mild and a beneficent religion; and we were
protected by impartial laws and the purest administration of justice; we
were living under a system of government, which our own happy experience
led us to pronounce the best and wisest, and which had become the
admiration of the World. From all these blessings we must for ever have
been excluded, had there been any truth in those principles, which some
had not hesitated to lay down as applicable to the case of Africa; and
we should have been at this moment little superior, either in morals,
knowledge, or refinement, to the rude inhabitants of that continent.
If then we felt that this perpetual confinement in the fetters of brutal
ignorance would have been the greatest calamity which could have
befallen us; if we viewed with gratitude the contrast between our
present and our former situation; if we shuddered to think of the misery
which would still have overwhelmed us, had our country continued to the
present times, through some cruel policy, to be the mart for slaves to
the more civilized nations of the World;--God forbid that we should any
longer subject Africa to the same dreadful scourge, and exclude the
sight of knowledge from her coasts, which had reached every other
quarter of the globe!
He trusted we should no longer continue this commerce, and that we
should no longer consider ourselves as conferring too great a boon on
the natives of Africa in restoring them to the rank of human beings, He
trusted we should not think ourselves too liberal, if, by abolishing the
Slave Trade, we gave them the same common chance of civilization with
other parts of the World.
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