[ 28 ]
defiance, and spurns at all the principles, both of natural and revealed religion.
How the British nation first came to be concerned in a practice, by which the rights and liberties of mankind are so violently infringed, and which is so opposite to the apprehensions Englishmen have always had of what natural justice requires, is indeed surprising. It was about the year 1563, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, that the English first engaged in the Guinea Trade; when it appears, from an account in Hill's Naval History, page 293, That when Captain Hawkins returned from his first voyage to Africa, that generous spirited Princess, attentive to the interest of her subjects, sent for the Commander, to whom she expressed her concern lest any of the African Negroes should be carried off without their free consent, declaring it would be detestable, and call down the vengeance of heaven upon the undertakers. Captain Hawkins promised to comply with the Queen's injunction: nevertheless, we find in the account, given in the same History, of Hawkins' second voyage, the author using these remarkable words, Here began the horrid practice of forcing the Africans into slavery.
Labut, a Roman Missionary, in his account of the Isles of America, at page 114, of the 4th vol. mentions, that Lewis the 13th, father to the present French King's grand father, was extremely uneasy at a law by which all the Negroes of his Colonies were to be made slaves; but it being strongly urged to him, as the readiest means for their conversion to Christianity, he acquiesced therewith.
And altho' we have not many accounts of the impressions which this piratical invasion of the rights of mankind, gave to serious minded people, when first
