Fox's politics may now be obsolete: his parliamentary triumphs may be air: his eloquence may be rivalled, or shorn of its beams by time: but one source of glory cannot be extinguished, -the abolition of the slave-trade! This victory no man can take from him. Whatever variety of opinion may be formed on his public principles, whatever condemnation may be found for his personal career, whatever doubts of his great faculties; on this one subject all voices will be raised in his honour; and the hand of every man of English feeling will add a stone to the monument that perpetuates his name. On the 10th of June, 1806, Fox brought forward his motion, in a speech brief but decided. "So fully," said he, "am I impressed with the vast importance and necessity of attaining what will be the object of my motion to-night, that if, during the forty years that I have had the honour of a seat in parliament, I should have been so fortunate as to accomplish that, and that only; I should think I had done enough, and should retire from public life with comfort, and the conscious satisfaction that I had done my duty."

66

His speech concluded with the immortal resolution, THAT THIS HOUSE, CONCEIVING THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE TO BE CONTRARY

THE PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE, HUMANITY, AND SOUND POLICY; WILL, WITH ALL PRACTICABLE EXPEDITION, PROCEED ΤΟ TAKE EFFECTUAL

MEASURES FOR ABOLISHING THE SLAVE-TRADE,

IN SUCH MANNER AND AT SUCH PERIOD AS MAY BE DEEMED ADVISABLE."

On the division, one hundred and fourteen voted for the measure, against it only fifteen! This was the last effort made by Fox. In a few days after, he was taken ill of his mortal disease. No orator, no philosopher, no patriot, could have wished for a nobler close to his labours.

It must seem extraordinary that Pitt should have left this great duty to be done by another. Some of his ablest speeches had been in condemnation of the slave-trade. He had pronounced it a national disgrace and calamity. And what man, not turned into a wild beast by avarice, that passion alternately the meanest and the most daring, the basest and the bloodiest, --that passion which, of all, assimilates and combines the most thoroughly with the evil of perverted human nature; but must have looked upon that trade with horror? 66 This," exclaimed Burke, "is not a traffic in the labour of man, but in the man himself." It was ascertained that from seventy to eighty thousand slaves had been carried from Africa to the West Indies in a single year; and with what misery beyond all calculation! agonies of heart, at the utter and eternal parting from friends, kindred, and home! What indescribable torture in the slave-ships, where they burned under the tropical day, packed in dens,

What

without room to move, to stand, or even to lie down, -chained, scourged, famished, withering with fever and thirst: human layers festering on each other; the dead, the dying, the frantic, and the tortured, compressed together like bales of merchandise; hundreds seizing the first moment of seeing the light and air, to fling themselves overboard; hundreds dying of grief, thousands dying of pestilence; and the rest, even more wretched, surviving only for a hopeless captivity in a strange land, to labour for life, under the whips of overseers, savages immeasurably more brutal and debased than their unfortunate victims!

With what eyes must Providence have looked down upon this tremendous accumulation of guilt, this hideous abuse of the power of European knowledge and wealth over the miserable African; and with what solemn justice may it not have answered the cry of the blood out of the ground! The vengeance of Heaven on individuals is wisely, in most instances, put beyond human discovery. But, for nations there is no judgment to come, no great after-reckoning to make all straight, and vindicate the ways of God to man. They must be punished here; and it might be neither difficult nor unproductive of the best knowledge -the Christian's faith in the ever-waking and resistless control of Providence; to trace the punishment of this enormous crime in Europe. The slave-trade perhaps lost America to Eng

land, and the crime was thus punished at its height, and within view of the spot where it was committed. But our crime was done in ignorance; the people of this kingdom had known little of its nature; and they required only to know it, to wash their hands of the stain. It may have been for this reason, that, of all unsuccessful wars, the American was the least marked with national loss; and that, of all abscissions of empire, the independence of the United States was the most rapidly converted into national advantage. But it is upon the kingdoms which, in the face of perfect knowledge, in scorn of remonstrances that might wake the stones to feel, in treacherous evasion of treaties, in defiance of even the base bargains in which they exacted the money of this country to buy off the blood of the African, have still carried on the trade; that undisguised and unmitigated vengeance may have fallen, and be still falling.

The three great slave-traders, whom it has been. found impossible to persuade or to restrain, are France, Spain, and Portugal. And in what circumstances are the colonies for whose peculiar support this dreadful traffic was carried on? France has totally lost St. Domingo, the finest colony in the world, and her colonial trade is now a cipher. Spain has lost all; Portugal has lost all. Mexico, South America, and the Brazils, are severed from

And what have been

their old masters for ever. the especial calamities of the sovereigns of those countries? They have been, all three, expatriated, and the only three. Other sovereigns have suffered temporary evil under the chances of war; but France, Spain, and Portugal, have exhibited the peculiar shame of three dynasties at once in exile: the Portuguese flying across the sea, to escape from an enemy in its capital, and hide its head in a barbarian land ;—the Spanish dethroned, and sent to display its spectacle of mendicant and decrepit royalty through Europe;-and the French doubly undone !

The first effort of Louis XVIII. on his restoration, was to re-establish the slave-trade. Before twelve months were past, he was flying for his life to the protection of strangers! On the second restoration the trade was again revived. All representations of its horrors, aggravated as they are now by the lawless rapacity of the foreign traders, were received with mock acquiescence, and real scorn. And where are the Bourbons

now?

And what is the peace, or the prosperity, of the countries that have thus dipped their guilty gains in human miseries? They are three vast centres of feud and revolutionary terror; - Portugal, with an unowned monarch, reigning by the bayonet and the scaffold, with half her leading men in dungeons, with her territory itself a dun