[clxiv. 79]

1820 July 11

Emancipation Spanish

Ult r.

Introduction

This same reason, were there no other would suffice for preventing your brethren in America, though so much more numerous than yourselves, from selling you, though as to your selling them I should have no great objection to it, provided it were to themselves: and whatever you thus get from them, be it ever so little, it would be all of it clear gain to you, and by so much /that same amount/ more than you ever get from them, if kept under subjection to your rulers.

All this however is but a sort of wrangling - logical wrangling: arguments directed rather against the man, than to the one thing needful: the effects of the arrangement in question upon the interests concerned: this is the practical ground on which the decision will be founded: upon the interests concerned on both sides, but more particularly on the side of those, at whose hands the sacrifice is called for - the sacrifice painful as it is, may well be by the mouth of one to whom both parties are equal objects of regard, and who has no narrow interest to bear him for or against either or to come into competition with that sympathy and that social interest which has excited and animates these his humble labours in the service of both.