He has exhorted me to
perseverance in this noble cause. Could I have wished for a more favourable
reception?--But mark the issue. He was the nearest relation of a rich
person concerned in the traffic; and if he were to come forward with his
evidence publicly, he should ruin all his expectations from that quarter.
In the same week I have visited another at a still greater distance. I have
met with similar applause. I have heard him describe scenes of misery which
he had witnessed, and on the relation of which he himself almost wept. But
mark the issue again.--"I am a surgeon," says he: "through that window you
see a spacious house. It is occupied by a West Indian. The medical
attendance upon his family is of considerable importance to the temporal
interests of mine. If I give you my evidence I lose his patronage. At the
house above him lives an East Indian. The two families are connected: I
fear, if I lose the support of one, I shall lose that of the other also:
but I will give you privately all the intelligence in my power."
The reader may now conceive the many miserable hours I must have spent,
after such visits, in returning home; and how grievously my heart must have
been afflicted by these cruel disappointments, but more particularly where
they arose from causes inferior to those which have been now mentioned, or
from little frivolous excuses, or idle and unfounded conjectures, unworthy
of beings expected to fill a moral station in life.
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