An appeal to the religion, justice and humanity of the inhabitants of the British Empire, in behalf of the Negro slaves in the West Indies / by Wm. Wilberforce, Esq., M.P.

  • Wilberforce, William, 1759-1833.
Date:
1823
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An appeal to the religion, justice and humanity of the inhabitants of the British Empire, in behalf of the Negro slaves in the West Indies / by Wm. Wilberforce, Esq., M.P. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    involves have indeed been drawn into notice : but when the public attention has been attracted to this subject, it has been unadvisedly turned to particular instances of cruelty, rather than to the system in general, and to those essential and incurable vices which will invariably exist wherever the power of man over man is unlimited. Even at this day, few of our countrymen, comparatively speaking, are at all apprised of the real condition of the bulk of the Negro population ; and, perhaps, many of our non-resi- dent West-Indian proprietors are fully as ignorant of it as other men. Often, indeed, the most humane of the num- ber, (many of them are men whose humanity is unquestion- able,) are least of all aware of it, from estimating, not unnaturally, the actual state of the case, by the benevolence of their own well meant, but unavailing, directions to their managers in the western hemisphere. The persuasion, that it is to the public ignorance of the actual evils of West-Indian Slavery that we can alone as- cribe its having been suffered so long to remain unreformed, and almost unnoticed, is strongly confirmed by referring to what passed when the question for abolishing the Slave Trade was seriously debated in 1792. For then, on the general ground merely of the incurable injustice and acknowledged evils of slavery, aggravated, doubtless, by the consideration that it was a slavery forcibly imposed on unoffending men for our advantage, many of the most strenuous and most formidable opponents of the immediate abolition of the Slave Trade charged us with gross incon- sistency, in not fairly following up our own arguments, and proposing the gradual extinction also of Slavery itself. “ If,” they argued, “ it is contrary, as you maintain, to the soundest principles of justice, no less than to the clearest dictates of humanity, to permit the seizure, and transportation across the Atlantic, of innocent men to labour for our benefit, can it be more just, or less inhuman, to leave the victims of our rapacity to a life of slavery and degradation's the hope- less lot of themselves and their descendants for ever? If, indeed, it had been true, as was alleged by the African mer- I