before thee; let it enter into thine ears! Make even those that lead them captive to pity them and turn their captivity. O burst thou all their chains in sunder; more especially the chains of their sins: thou Saviour of all, make them free, that they may be free indeed!

ADAM CLARKE.

Isaiah lviii, 6.-Let the oppressed go free. How can any nation pretend to fast, or worship God at all, or dare profess that they believe in the existence of such a Being, while they carry on what is called the slave-trade: and traffic in the souls, blood, and bodies of men! O ye most flagitious of knaves and worst of hypocrites! cast off at once the mask of religion, and deepen not your endless perdition by professing the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, while you continue in this traffic!

THOMAS SCOTT.

Exodus xxi, 16.-"He that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hands, he shall surely be put to death." Stealing a man in order to sell him for a slave, whether the thief had actually sold him, or whether he continued in his possession. He who stole any one of the human family, in order to make a slave of him, should be punished with death. The crime would be aggravated by sending them away into foreign countries to be slaves to idolaters.

Deuteronomy xxiv, 7.-"If a man be found stealing any of his brethren of the children of Israel, and maketh merchandise of him, or selleth him, then THAT THIEF SHALL DIE."-Every man is now our brother, whatever be his nation, complexion or creed. How then can the merchandise of men and women be carried on, without transgressing this commandment, or abetting those who do? A man may steal, or purchase of those who do steal, hundreds of men and women, and not only escape with impunity, but grow great like a prince. According to the law of God, whoever stole cattle restored four or five fold; whoever stole one human being, though an infant or an idiot, must die.

1. Timothy i, 10.-" Men-stealers."-Men-stealers are inserted among those daring criminals against whom the law of God directed its awful curses. Persons who kidnapped men to sell them for slaves. This practice seems inseparable from the other iniquities and oppressions of slavery; nor can a slave-dealer by any means keep free from that atrocious criminality, if the receiver be as bad as the thief. They who encourage that unchristian traffic by purchasing that, which is thus unjustly acquired, are partakers of their crimes.—MACKNIGHT. That is the only species of theft which is punished with death by the laws of God.

James ii, 12, 13.-"So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty.

"For he shall have judgment without mercy that hath showed no mercy, and mercy rejoiceth against judgment." On this verse Dr. Scott makes the following remarks- All who are not taught to show

mercy to others, must expect to be dealt with according to the severity of justice in respect to their eternal state. What then must be the doom of the cruel oppressors and iniquitous tyrants of the human species? But the hard-hearted, selfish, implacable, and oppressive professor of Christianity, has the greatest cause to tremble; for if he shall have judgment without mercy, who hath shown no mercy,' the meanest slave that ever was whipt and worked to death, must be considered as happy, compared with his haughty cruel tyrant, and this shall sufficiently appear, when the earth shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain.""

Revelation xviii, 13.-"Slaves and souls of men."-Not only slaves, but the souls of men are mentioned as articles of commerce, which is beyond comparison, the most infamous of all traffics that the demon of avarice ever devised; almost infinitely more atrocious, than the accursed slave-trade. Alas! too often, injustice, oppression, fraud, avarice, or excessive indulgence are connected with extensive commerce; and to number the persons of men, with oxen, asses, sheep and horses, as the stock of a farm, or with bales of goods, as the cargo of a ship, is no doubt a most detestable and anti-christian practice.-Scott's Commentaries on the Bible.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

We have offended, Oh! my countrymen !
We have offended very grievously,
And been most tyrannous. From east to west
A groan of accusation pierces Heaven!
The wretched plead against us; multitudes
Countless and vehement, the sons of God,
Our brethren! Like a cloud that travels on,
Steam'd up from Cairo's swamps of pestilence,
Even so, my countrymen! have we gone forth
And borne to distant tribes slavery and pangs,
And deadlier far our vices, whose deep taint
With slow perdition murders the whole man,
His body and his soul!

Sibylline Leaves.

There are truths so self-evident, or so immediately and palpably deduced from those that are, or are acknowledged for such, that they are at once intelligible to all men who possess the common advantages of the social state; although by sophistry, by evil habit, by the neglect, false persuasions and impostures of an Anti-Christian priesthood joined in one conspiracy with the violence of tyrannical governors, the understandings of men have become so darkened and their consciences so lethargic, that there may arise a necessity for the republication of these truths, and this too with a voice of loud alarm and impassioned warning. Such were the doctrines proclaimed by the first christians to the pagan world; such were the lightnings flashed by Wickliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin, Zuinglius, Latimer, &c., across the papal darkness, and such in our time the truths with which Thomas Clarkson, and his excellent confederates, the Quakers, fought and conquered the legalized banditti of men-stealers, the numerous and

powerful perpetrators and advocates of rapine and murder, and (of blacker guilt than either) slavery. Truths of this kind being indispensable to man, considered as a moral being, are above all expediency, all accidental consequences; for as sure as God is holy, and man immortal, there can be no evil so great as the ignorance or disregard of them. It is the very madness of mock. prudence to oppose the removal of a poisonous dish on account of the pleasant sauces or nutritious viands which would be lost with it! The dish contains destruction to that, for which alone we wish the palate to be gratified or the body to be nourished.-The Friend, pages 49, 50.

JAMES STEPHEN, Esq.

Enough was known before; more than enough was incontrovertibly proved; nay, enough was always admitted or undenied, to make the legislative toleration of this slavery a disgrace to the British and Christian name. Iniquity, indeed, of every kind loses in human detestation what it gains in mischief, by wide unreproved diffusion, and by age. We sin remorselessly, because our fathers sinned, and because multitudes of our own generation sin, in the same way without discredit. But if ever those most flagitious crimes of Europe, slavetrade and colonial slavery, shall cease to be tolerated by human laws, and live in history alone, men will look back upon them with the horror they deserve; and wonder as much at the depravity of the age that could establish or maintain them, as we now do at the murderous rites of our pagan ancestors, or the ferocious cannibal manners of New Zealand.

There is enough in the simplest conception of personal hereditary slavery, to revolt every just and liberal mind, independently of all aggravations to be found in its particular origin, or in abuses of the master's powers. But how much should sympathy and indignation be enhanced, when the cruel perpetual privation of freedom, and of almost every civil and human right, is the punishment of no crime, nor the harsh consequence of public hostility in war, but imposed upon the innocent and helpless, by the hand of rapacious violence alone; and maintained for no other object but the sordid one of the master's profit, by the excessive labor to which they are compelled?

Were our merchants to send agents to buy captives from the bandits in the forests of Italy, or from the pirates on the Barbary coast, and sell them here as slaves, to work for our farmers or manufacturers; and were the purchasers to claim, in consequence, a right to hold these victims of rapine and avarice, with their children, in bondage for ever, and to take their work without wages; what would it be but the same identical case we are contemplating, except that the captives were of a different complexion? Yet the bandits and pirates are hanged; and their vendees, in the case supposed, would have less to apprehend from actions or indictments for false imprisonment, than from the vengeance of indignant multitudes. It certainly, at least, would not be necessary, for the purpose of their deliverance, to prove to the British parliament or people, that the poor captives were overworked,

under fed, driven with whips to their work, punished in a brutal way for every real or imputed fault, and by such complicated oppressions brought in great numbers prematurely to their graves.

LORD NUGENT.

The slave-trade finds no one bold enough now to defend even its memory. And yet when we hear the slave-trade reprobated, and slavery defended by the same persons, I must own I think the slavetrade unfairly treated. The abuse of defunct slave-trade is a cheap price for the abettor of living slavery to pay by way of compromise. But we cannot allow the Colonial party on these terms to cry truce with us, by stigmatizing the slave-trade. There is not one general principle on which the slave-trade is to be stigmatized which does not impeach slavery itself.

DR. LUSHINGTON.

It has never been given by God to man to hold his fellow man in bondage. Every thing short of a total abolition of slavery he considered as unsatisfactory, and ending only in disappointment and discontent. The supporters of the abolition of slavery took their stand upon the eternal principles of truth and justice, and it would be next to blasphemy to doubt their success.

ANDREW THOMPSON.

Slavery is the very Upas tree of the moral world, beneath whose pestiferous shade all intellect languishes, and all virtue dies. It must be cut down and eradicated; it must be, root and branch of it, cast into the consuming fire, and its ashes scattered to the four winds of heaven. It is thus you must deal with slavery. You must annihilate it,-annihilate it now, and annihilate it for ever.

ROWLAND HILL.

Slavery is made up of every crime that treachery, cruelty, and murder can invent; and men-stealers are the very worst of thieves. The most knavish tricks are practised by these dealers in human flesh; and if slaves think of our general character, they must suppose that christians are devils, and that christianity was forged in hell.

GROTIUS.

Those are men-stealers, who abduct, keep, sell, or buy slaves or freemen. To steal a man is the highest kind of theft.

POPE LEO, X.

Not only the christian religion, but Nature herself cries out against a state of slavery.

J. P. CURRAN-H. GRATTAN-MISS EDGEWOrth.

JOHN PHILPOT CURRAN.

"UNIVERSAL EMANCIPATION."-I speak in the spirit of the British Law, which makes liberty commensurate with, and inseparable from, the British soil-which proclaims, even to the stranger and the sojourner, the moment he sets his foot upon British earth, that the ground on which he treads is holy, and consecrated by the genius of Universal Emancipation. No matter in what language his doom may have been pronounced; no matter what complexion incompatible with freedom, an Indian or an African sun may have burnt upon him; no matter in what disastrous battle his liberty may have been cloven down; no matter with what solemnities he may have been devoted upon the altar of slavery; the first moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain, the altar and the god sink together in the dust; his soul walks abroad in her own majesty; his body swells beyond the measure of his chains, that burst from around him, and he stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled, by the irresistible Genius of UNIVERSAL EMANCIPATION.

HENRY GRATTAN.

Liberty-and is this subject a matter of indifference?—Liberty, which, like the Deity, is an essential spirit best known by its consequences-liberty, which now animates you in your battles by sea and land, and lifts you up proudly superior to your enemies-liberty, that glorious spark and emanation of the Divinity, which fired your ances tors, and taught them to feel like an Hampden, that it was not life, but the condition of living! An Irishman sympathizes in these noble sentiments-wherever he goes-to whatever quarter of the earth he journeys-whatever wind blows his poor garments, let him but have the pride, the glory, the ostentation of liberty!

MARIA EDGEWORTH.

Are we disposed to pity the slave-merchant, who, urged by the maniacal desire for gold, hears, unmoved, the groans of his fellowcreatures, the execrations of mankind, and that "small still voice," which haunts those who are stained with blood?—Practical Education. Granting it to be physically impossible that the world should exist without rum and sugar and indigo, why could they not be produced by freemen as well as by slaves? If we hired negroes for laborers, instead of purchasing them for slaves, do you think they would not work as well as now? Does any negro, under the fear of the overseer, work harder than a Birmingham journeyman, or a Newcastle collier; who toil for themselves and their families?

The law, in our case, seems to make the right; and the very reverse ought to be done; the right should make the law.