judicial authority, might be exercised or abused at the discretion or caprice of him who held it, or of him who had the right of appointing to it."

The House having divided on Mr. Erskine's motion," that Sir Peter Burrell do leave the chair," it was rejected by a majority of 113 to 30. The original motion was then put and carried.

In consequence of the decision upon this motion, the Commons informed the Lords, on the 17th of February following, that they were ready to proceed upon the impeachment of Mr. Warren Hastings; but the Lords, before they sent an answer, appointed a committee to examine precedents for the purpose of enabling them to decide whether the dissolution of Parliament had put an end to the impeachment.

On the 16th of May, the report of the committee was taken into consideration, and after an amendment, proposed by the Earl of Radnor, "that the judges should be ordered to attend the House to deliver their opinions as to whether the recognizances entered into by Mr. Hastings, on the 21st of May, 1787, were still in force," had been rejected by a majority of 70 to 20, the original motion, that a message be sent to the Commons to acquaint them that this House will proceed upon the trial of Warren Hastings, Esquire," was put and carried. The numbers were 36 to 18. The minority included the names of Lords Thurlow and Kenyon; and, in the majority, those of the Earl of Guildford* and Lord Loughborough appeared; the latter of whom said, in the course of the debate, that he had been requested by Earls Camden and Mansfield-both being prevented from delivering their sentiments in person, the former from fatigue, and the latter from old age and infirmity of body-to state that their opinions coincided with his own upon the subject of the present motion.

It having been thus decided by large majorities in both Houses, that a dissolution of Parliament did not put an end to an impeachment, the trial of Mr. Hastings was proceeded with on the following Monday, the 23rd of May.

ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE TRADE.

1791. April 19. The first business which engaged the attention of the House of Commons on the meeting of Parliament after the Christmas recess, was the Abolition of the Slave-trade. Upon the motion of Mr. Wilberforce, it was ordered, on the 4th of February, that the House should resolve itself into a committee of the whole House to consider of the African slave-trade, and a select committee was appointed to take the evidence of witnesses ordered to attend the committee of the whole House. A considerable body of evidence having been thus taken, Mr. Wilberforce, on the 18th of April, in a com

* Upon the death of his father, on the 4th of August, 1790, Lord North succeeded to the peerage and sat in the Upper House, by the title of the Earl of Guildford.

+ Lord Mansfield was now in his eighty-seventh year, having been born on the 2nd of March, 1704, O. S.

mittee of the whole House, entered into a long and minute discussion of the subject. He commenced with giving an accurate detail of the unfair manner in which slaves were obtained on the coast of Africa. He particularized many acts of the most flagrant cruelties; and exposed all the mean devices and barbarous policy of those who were concerned in this murderous traffic. Different tribes of Indians, he said, were encouraged to make war on each other for the sake of taking prisoners, and of thus providing the market with slaves; the administration of justice in most parts of Africa was converted into an engine of oppression; and every fraud, every violence, was practised, that low cunning and brutal ferocity could suggest. He made a variety of remarks upon their unparalleled sufferings under the horrors of the middle passage, and after their arrival at the destined soil of servitude and wretchedness. He next contended that the abolition of the trade would not operate to the real detriment of our West India islands. He argued that, when the planter should be deprived of all prospect of a future market, he would be induced to pay a proper attention to the health, morals, and comfort of his slaves, and by thus considerably augmenting not only their happiness but their numbers, would render continual supplies from Africa unnecessary. He then proceeded to consider the consequences of the abolition in another point of view-in its probable effects on the marine. This trade, instead of being a nursery for seamen, was, in his idea, their grave. It appeared from the Liverpool and Bristol muster rolls, that in 350 slave-ships, having on board 12,263 persons, 2,645 were lost in twelve months; whereas in 462 West Indiamen, having on board 7,640 persons, 118 only were lost in seven months. All attempts to meliorate the condition of the negroes without the total abolition of slavery, he considered as likely to prove inefficacious and unsafe. Their situation, he thought, could never be much amended by a gradual abolition, or by any laws of regulation which the West Indian legislatures might choose to adopt. The advantages of the trade, in a commercial point of view, he deemed it almost an unbecoming condescension to discuss; but could its advocates prove (what he knew never could be proved) that it was of considerable importance to this country, either in its immediate operation or remote effects, still his decision would, in no degree, be affected by that consideration. "There is a smell of blood," he said, "which all the perfumes of Arabia cannot remove." He concluded by moving, "That the chairman be instructed to bring in a bill to prevent the farther importation of slaves into the British Colonies in the West Indies." After the motion had been opposed by Colonel Tarleton and Mr. Grosvenor, and supported by Mr. Martin, Mr. Burdon, and Mr. Francis, Mr. Pitt expressed his wishes for an opportunity to deliver his own sentiments very fully, which, he feared, it was impossible to do that night; he would, therefore, with the consent of the House, move that the chairman do now leave the chair, with a view of resuming the subject on the very next day, meaning to put off the orders of that day until the day after. Colonel Tarleton said, it was his earnest desire to have the question settled without any delay whatever; and

as the House was then extremely full, and there were many gentlemen who, to his knowledge, were going next day out of town, he should resist the motion of adjournment. Colonel Phipps said, that though he agreed with the honourable gentlemen in opposing the abolition of the slave-trade, yet he could not agree in opposing the question of adjournment; for he wished to have an opportunity of declaring what were those reasons which would decide his conduct.

Mr. Fox said that," although the opposition to any adjournment was undoubtedly uncandid and unbecoming, yet he thought that the honourable colonel who pressed for an immediate division understood better the interest of his own side of the question than the other honourable gentleman;" for Mr. Fox said, "he had ever conceived that the only way by which the abolition of the slave-trade could be prevented must be by stifling all inquiry, and by hurrying the House into some vote, which might seem to decide the question, before the opportunity of any real debate upon the principles of the slave-trade was afforded. It was a trade which, the gentlemen themselves well knew, would not bear to be discussed. Let there be discussion, and although there were some symptoms of pre-determination in some gentlemen, the abolition of the abominable traffic must be carried. He would not believe that there could be found in the House of Commons men of such hard hearts, and of such inaccessible understandings, as to vote an assent to the continuance of the trade, and then go home to their houses, their friends, and their families, satisfied with their vote, after being made fully aware of what they were doing, by having opened their ears to the discussion."

The question of adjournment was carried, and on the following day the debate upon Mr. Wilberforce's motion was resumed. It was opposed by Sir William Young, Mr. Stanley, Mr. Cawthorne, Colonel Phipps, Mr. Alderman Watson, Major Scott, Mr. Drake, and Lord Sheffield; and supported by Mr. Montagu, Lord John Russell, Mr. William Smith, Mr. Courtenay, Lord Carysfort, Mr. Pitt, and Mr. Fox.

Mr. Fox observed that, "some expressions which he had used on the preceding day had been complained of as too harsh and severe. He had now had four-and-twenty hours to reflect on his words; he had revolved them over and over again in his mind, but he could not prevail on himself to retract them; because the more he considered the subject in discussion, the more did he believe that if, after reading all the evidence on the table, and attending to the debate, any gentleman could continue to oppose the abolition of the slave-trade, and could thus avow himself, after a full knowledge of the subject, an abettor of this shameful traffic in human flesh, it could only be from some hardness of heart, or some such difficulty of understanding as he really knew not how to account for.

"Several gentlemen had considered this question as a question of political freedom; whereas it was no such thing. No man would suspect him of

being an enemy to political freedom; his sentiments were too well known to leave him subject to such a suspicion. But this was a question not of political, but of personal freedom. Political freedom was undoubtedly as great a blessing as any people under heaven, considered collectively as a people, could pant after, or seek to possess; but political freedom when it came to be compared with personal freedom, sank to nothing, and became no blessing at all in comparison. To confound these two served, therefore, only to render all argument on either perplexing and unintelligible. It was personal freedom that was now the point in question. Personal freedom must be the first object of every human being; and it was a right, of which he who deprives a fellow-creature is absolutely criminal in so depriving him, and which he who withholds when it is in his power to restore, is no less criminal in withholding." Mr. Fox therefore declared that, " though he professed great regard for an honourable friend who had complained of his words, and for a noble lord who sat near him, (Lord John Russell), yet unless they endeavoured, zealously and sincerely, to put an end to so horrid a violation. of personal freedom, as the African slave-trade most undoubtedly was, however it might hurt those for whom he felt an affection and respect, yet he could not so far compliment them as to retract his words, or to neglect speaking in the manner which his duty required, upon a subject so serious as the present.

"The House being now apprised of the nature of this trade, having received evidence, having had the facts undeniably established-knowing, in short, what the slave-trade was-he declared, that if they did not by the vote of that night mark to all mankind their abhorrence of a practice so enormous, so savage, so repugnant to all laws, human and divine, it would be more scandalous and more defaming in the eyes of the country and of the world than any vote which any House of Commons had ever given. He desired them seriously to reflect, before they gave their votes, what they were about to do that evening. If they voted that the slave-trade should not be abolished, they would, by their vote that night, give a parliamentary sanction to rapine, robbery, and murder; for a system of rapine, robbery, and murder, the slave-trade had now most clearly been proved to be.

"Every gentleman who had perused the examination of the witnesses upon the table, must acknowledge that he had not used one word too strong. He had read the Privy Council's report some time ago, but owned that it was but lately that he had turned his attention to the evidence since taken before the select committee; and he regretted that he had not done it sooner, for the facts he there found were such as proved the absolute necessity, on every consideration of morality and justice, of putting an end to a practice so pregnant with circumstances of terror and alarm to this country.

"That the pretence of danger to our West India Islands from the abolition was totally unfounded, the speech of the honourable gentleman who introduced the motion had fully convinced him; but if it had not, the speech of the right honourable the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in which speech he

had in so masterly a manner established that point, must have given him complete satisfaction. If there was anything for him to find fault with in the right honourable gentleman's speech, he should say, that it could only be his dwelling so much on that part of the subject, and bestowing so much eloquence and ability on it, so as to give an air of more importance to the pretexts of the other side than they at all deserved; thus drawing the attention of the committee from the justice of the question-which was a thing of infinitely greater magnitude.

"It had been shown, on a comparison of the deaths and births in Jamaica, that there was not now any decrease; but if there had been, it would have made no difference in his conduct on the subject; for had the mortality been ever so great, he should have ascribed it entirely to the system of importing negroes, instead of encouraging the breed. If any man were to tell him of a country in which, though horses were used, yet very few were bred, this would not induce him to suppose there was any unfriendliness in the climate of that country to the natural propagation of horses, but merely to its being found cheaper by the inhabitants to buy horses than to breed them. It was not his fault," Mr. Fox said, "that he was reduced to the degrading necessity of speaking of human beings as if they were horses.

"But what he urged in the case of horses was evidently the case with slaves in the West Indies. The climate was declared to be remarkably congenial to them, and to be just like their own. This had been actually pleaded-with a different view indeed-in favour of the slave-trade. Then why should they not breed? It was merely because the West India planters thought it more convenient, more agreeable to them, or more cheap, to buy them fit for work, than to breed them: it was because the planters did not choose to treat them with that attention and humanity which would ensure their breeding. What then was the purpose for which this accursed and horrid traffic in human creatures was desired to be kept up? The purpose was this-in order to give the planters the opportunity of destroying the negroes on their estates as fast as they pleased. The plea on which the slavetrade to Africa was to be kept up-if the mortality in the islands was the plea-could only be in order to indulge the planters in the liberty of misusing their slaves, so as to check propagation; for it was from ill usage only that, in a climate so natural to them and so favourable, their numbers could ever diminish." Mr. Fox stated, therefore, that "if the mortality in the West Indies were ten times greater than it was, this would only be a ten times stronger reason for forbidding the importation of slaves. It would only argue ten times more ill usage than now prevailed, and Parliament would be so much the more loudly called upon to put an end to a system so destructive of human life.

"The very ground, therefore, on which the planters rested the necessity of fresh importations, namely, the destruction of lives in the West Indies, was itself the strongest reason that could possibly be given for the abolition of the trade, and the more strongly they chose to urge the more strongly should

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