He could indeed have expressed his own conviction in fewer words.

He needed only to have made one or two short statements, and to have quoted the commandment, "Thou shalt do no murder." But he thought it his duty to lay the whole of the case, and the whole of its guilt, before them.

They would see now that no mitigations, no palliatives, would either be efficient or admissible.

Nothing short of an absolute abolition could be adopted.

This they owed to Africa: they owed it, too, to their own moral characters.