‘On the comparative Estimate of the Slave Trade, the Practice of Crimping, and Mr Pitt’s Partial Requisition Bill’

This chapter presents the lecture by John Thelwall on 'the Comparative Estimate of the Slave Trade, the Practice of Crimping and Mr Pitt’s Partial Requisition Bill’. The lecture responds directly to parliamentary debates about the slave trade, in particular the claims that gradual abolition is the most expedient solution, as advanced by Henry Dundas (1742–1811), first Viscount Melville, and that the slaves themselves are happier than the poor of Britain, as advanced by Sir William Young (1749–1815), second Baronet, in his appendix to Bryan Edwards’s An Historical Survey of the Island of Saint Domingo (1801). Thelwall makes the case for immediate abolition of the slave trade in the name of justice.