Africa was the ground, on which he chiefly rested; and there it was, that his two honourable friends, one of whom had proposed gradual abolition, and the other regulation, did not carry their principles to their full extent.

Both had confessed the trade to be a moral evil.

How much stronger then was the argument for immediate than for gradual abolition! If on the ground of a moral evil it was to be abolished at last, why ought it not now?
Why was injustice to be suffered to remain for a single hour?
He knew of no evil, which ever had existed, nor could he imagine any to exist, worse than the tearing of eighty thousand persons annually from their native land, by a combination of the most civilized nations, in the most enlightened quarter of the globe; but more especially by that nation, which called herself the most free and the most happy of them all.
He would now notice the objection, that other nations would not give up the Slave-trade, if we were to renounce it.

But if the trade were stained but by a thousandth part of the criminality, which he and others, after a thorough investigation of the subject, charged upon it, the House ought immediately to vote its abolition.

This miserable argument, if persevered in, would be an eternal bar to the annihilation of the evil.