It had not even to plead what could often be said in favour of the most unjustifiable wars.
Though conquest had sometimes originated in ambition, and in the worst of motives, yet the conquerors and the conquered were sometimes blended afterwards into one people; so that a system of common interest arose out of former differences.

But where was the analogy of the cases?
Was it only at the outset that we could trace violence and injustice on the part of the Slave-trade?
Were the oppressors and the oppressed so reconciled, that enmities ultimately ceased ?--No.

Was it reasonable then to urge a prescriptive right, not to the fruits of an antient and forgotten evil, but to a series of new violences; to a chain of fresh enormities; to cruelties continually repeated; and of which every instance inflicted a fresh calamity, and constituted a separate and substantial crime?
The debate being over, the House divided; when it appeared that there were for Mr.Wilberforce's motion seventy-four, but against it eighty-two.
The motion for the general abolition of the Slave-trade having been thus lost again in the Commons, a new motion was made there soon after, by Mr.
Henry Thornton, on the same subject.

The prosecution of this traffic on certain parts of the coast of Africa had become so injurious to the new settlement at Sierra Leone, that not only its commercial prospects were impeded, but its safety endangered.

Mr.Thornton therefore brought in a bill to confine the Slave-trade within certain limits.