The Africans themselves had no objection to its continuance.
With respect to the Middle Passage, he believed the mortality there to be on an average only five in the hundred; whereas in regiments, sent out to the West Indies, the average loss in the year was about ten and a half per cent.
The Slave-trade was absolutely necessary, if we meant to carry on our West India commerce; for many attempts had been made to cultivate the lands in the different islands by White labourers; but they had always failed.
It had also the merit of keeping up a number of seamen in readiness for the state.

Lord Rodney had stated this as one of its advantages on the breaking out of a war.

Liverpool alone could supply nine hundred and ninety-three seamen annually.
He would now advert to the connections dependent upon the African trade.

It was the duty of the House to protect the planters, whose lives had been, and were then, exposed to imminent dangers, and whose property had undergone an unmerited depreciation.

To what could this depreciation, and to what could the late insurrection at Dominica, be imputed, which had been saved from horrid carnage and midnight-butchery only by the adventitious arrival of two British regiments?
They could only be attributed to the long delayed question of the abolition of the Slave-trade; and if this question were to go much longer unsettled, Jamaica would be endangered also.
To members of landed property he would observe, that the abolition would lessen the commerce of the country, and increase the national debt and the number of their taxes.