These circumstances occasioned one or two persons to attempt to answer it, and these answers brought Mr.Ramsay into the first controversy ever entered into on this subject, during which, as is the case in most controversies, the cause of truth was spread.
The works which Mr.Ramsay wrote upon this subject were, the essay just mentioned, in 1784.

_An Inquiry_, also, _into the Effects of the Abolition of the Slave Trade_, in 1784; _A Reply to Personal Invectives and Objections_, in 1785; _A Letter to James Tobin, Esq._, in 1787; _Objections to the Abolition of the Slave Trade, with Answers_; and _An Examination of Harris's Scriptural Researches on the Licitness of the Slave Trade_, in 1788; and _An Address on the proposed Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade_, in 1789.

In short, from the time when he first took up the cause, he was engaged in it till his death, which was not a little accelerated by his exertions.

He lived, however, to see this cause in a train of parliamentary inquiry, and he died satisfied; being convinced, as he often expressed, that the investigation must inevitably lead to the total abolition of the Slave Trade.
In the next year, that is, in the year 1785, another advocate was seen in Monsieur Necker, in his celebrated work on the _French Finances_, which had just been translated into the English language from the original work, in 1784.

This virtuous statesman, after having given his estimate of the population and revenue of the French West Indian colonies, proceeds thus:--"The colonies of France contain, as we have seen, near five hundred thousand slaves, and it is from the number of these poor wretches that the inhabitants set a value on their plantations.