Immediate Emancipation

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Excerpt from Immediate Emancipation: The Speech of Lord Brougham in the the House of Lords, on Tuesday, February 20th, 1838, on Slavery and the Slave-TradeLord brougham - There, my lords, I am understating again -with a Space of on] two feet and a half between the decks, a hundred and fifty of t ese wretched beings had been crowded and jammed in a way in which no Christian would treat the lower animals? I ask my noble friend whether he did not know of such a vessel, a vessel which had become to all the senses a nui sance not fit to be described? The Ophthalmia had broken out in that vessel to a considerable extent, and whenever a poor wretch was seized with it, instead of having medical assistance, instead of a surgeon being called in to relieve his sufferings, he was instantly, and in his chains, ¿ung overboard to stop the infection. I will no longer, my lords, be charged with making under-statements. I formerly told your lordships that one ship had brought 700 slaves and I stopped there, for I thought it was enough to harrow up the feelings of all. But, my lords, there was another ship which brought a cargo of 980 of these poor miserable, unoffending beings and out of those 980, without accident, without any direct murder, without any of them having been thrown overboard in chase, how many do your lordships think perished on the voyage? No fewer than 600 became the victims of the hardships and sufferings inse parable from the traffic, and from the effects of the pestilential hold in which they were confined. Four other ships sailed from the same port with negroes on board, of whom no fewer than fell a sacrifice on the voyage. As long as the slave trade was only contraband, this foul calculation was constantly made: If we escape three or four times, and are taken once, nay, if we escape only one-half the times, and-are captured the other half, the profits are so enormous - twenty, thirty, fifty thou sand pounds on one voyage - that the risk is well worth running, and, therefore, run it we will. In the year 1809, I had the sin gular felicity of laying the axe to the root of such traffic, and of stopping all such calculations, by making the slave trade felony, and punishing it as such. I knew that they who would run the risk when the thing could be reduced to a calculation of profit and loss would be slow to put their heads into that halter which, like all other felons, their crimes deserved. The bill was passed unani mously through all its stages in the House of Commons, and since that period, since it has been made felony, I will venture to say.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.