And first he would say, that the present deplorable state of that country, especially when we reflected that her chief calamities were to be ascribed to us, called for our generous aid, rather than justified any despair, on our part, of her recovery, and still less a repetition of our injuries.

On what ground of theory or history did we act, when we supposed that she was never to be reclaimed?
There was a time, which it might be now fit to call to remembrance, when human sacrifices, and even, this very practice of the Slave-trade, existed in our own island.

Slaves, as we may read in Henry's History of Great Britain, were formerly an established article of our exports.

"Great numbers," he says, "were exported, like cattle, from the British coast, and were to be seen exposed for sale in the Roman market."-- "Adultery, witchcraft, and debt," says the same historian, "were probably some of the chief sources of supplying the Roman market with British slaves--prisoners taken in war were added to the number--there might be also among them some unfortunate gamesters, who, after having lost all their goods, at length, staked themselves, their wives, and their children." Now every one of these sources of slavery had been stated to be at this hour a source of slavery in Africa.

If these practices, therefore, were to be admitted as proofs of the natural incapacity of its inhabitants, why might they not have been applied to ancient Britain?
Why might not then some Roman senator, pointing to British barbarians, have predicted with equal boldness, that these were a people, who were destined never to be free; who were without the understanding necessary for the attainment of useful arts; depressed by the hand of Nature below the level of the human species; and created to form a supply of slaves for the rest of the world?
But happily, since that time, notwithstanding what would then have been the justness of these predictions, we had emerged from barbarism.