Mr. Robert Thornton would support it also, as the only choice left him.
He dared not accede to a motion, by which we were to continue for seven
years to imbrue our hands in innocent blood.
Mr. Ryder (now Earl of Harrowby) would not support the trade for one
moment, if he could avoid it. He could not hold a balance with gold in
one scale, and blood in the other.
Mr. William Smith exposed the wickedness of restricting the trade to
certain ages. The original motion, he said, would only operate as a
transfer of cruelty from the aged and the guilty to the young and the
innocent. He entreated the House to consider, whether, if it related to
their own children, any one of them would vote for it.
Mr. Windham had hitherto felt a reluctance to speaking, not from the
abstruseness, but from the simplicity, of the subject; but he could not
longer be silent, when he observed those arguments of policy creeping
again out of their lurking-places, which had fled before eloquence and
truth. The House had clearly given up the policy of the question. They
had been determined by the justice of it. Why were they then to be
troubled again with arguments of this nature? These, if admitted, would
go to the subversion of all public as well as private morality.
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