CHAPTER II.
As it is desirable to know the true sources of events in history, so this will be realized in that of the abolition of the Slave Trade .-- Inquiry as to those who favoured the cause of the Africans previously to the year 1787 .-- All these to be considered as necessary forerunners in that cause .-- First forerunners were Cardinal Ximenes; the Emperor Charles the Fifth; Pope Leo the Tenth; Elizabeth, queen of England; Louis the Thirteenth, of France.
It would be considered by many, who have stood at the mouth of a river, and witnessed its torrent there, to be both an interesting and a pleasing journey to go to the fountain head, and then to travel on its banks downwards, and to mark the different streams in each side, which should run into it and feed it.

So I presume the reader will not be a little interested and entertained, in viewing with me the course of the abolition of the Slave Trade, in first finding its source, and then in tracing the different springs which have contributed to its increase.
And here I may observe that, in doing this, we shall have advantages, which historians have not always had in developing the causes of things.
Many have handed down to us, events, for the production of which they have given us but their own conjectures.

There has been often, indeed, such a distance between the events themselves, and the lives of those who have recorded them, that the different means and motives belonging to them have been lost through time.

On the present occasion, however, we shall have the peculiar satisfaction of knowing, that we communicate the truth, or that those which we unfold, are the true causes and means; for the most remote of all the human springs, which can be traced as having any bearing upon the great event in question, will fall within the period of three centuries, and the most powerful of them within the last twenty years.

These circumstances indeed have had their share in inducing me to engage in the present history.