PITT, WILLIAM, an English statesman and debater, second son of the Earl of Chatham, was born at Hayes, near Bromley, in Kent, May 28, 1759; died at Putney, January 23, 1806. His health being delicate, he was educated by a private tutor, but under the careful supervision of his father, until he was fourteen years old, when he entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. He was at this time proficient in Latin, Greek, and mathematics. He had chosen law as his profession, and on leaving college he took chambers in Lincoln's Inn, and was called to the bar in 1780. The next year he entered Parliament for Appleby, and before the close of the second session he stood in the first rank of debaters. On the formation of the Lord Shelburne Ministry in July, 1782, he was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. But this ministry having been defeated in March, 1783, resigned, and Pitt was urged by the King to accept the premiership, but declined. In December, 1783, Fox and Lord North having been dismissed, he was again offered the premiership, which he accepted. He had to contend against a strong opposition led by Fox, Lord North, and others, and was defeated in March, 1784, when Parliament was dissolved. He appealed to the people and was triumphantly sustained by them. In 1793 his administration having involved England in war with

France, which increased the national debt three hundred millions, his popularity began to wane. He resigned office in 1801, and was succeeded by Addington; but a coalition of Whigs and Tories formed against Addington and compelled him to resign, and Pitt was again appointed Prime-Minister in 1804. But his health gave way under the cares, annoyances, and failures of office, and he died in January, 1806. He was given a public funeral and buried near his father in Westminster Abbey. He was never married.

ON THE ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE-TRADE.

I have shown how great is the enormity of this evil, even on the supposition that we take only convicts and prisoners of war. But take the subject in the other way; take it on the grounds stated by the right honorable gentleman over the way, and how does it stand? Think of EIGHTY THOUSAND persons carried away out of their country by we know not what means! for crimes imputed for light or inconsiderable faults! for debt perhaps ! for the crime of witchcraft! or a thousand other weak and scandalous pretexts! besides all the fraud and kidnapping, the villanies and perfidy, by which the slave-trade is supplied. Reflect on these eighty thousand persons annually taken off! There is something in the horror of it that surpasses all the bounds of imagination. Admitting that there exists in Africa something like to courts of justice; yet what an office of humiliation and meanness it is in us to take upon ourselves to carry into execution the partial, the cruel, iniquitous sentences of such courts, as if we also were strangers to all religion, and to the first principles of justice! But that country, it is said, has been in some degree civilized, and civilized by us. It is said they have gained some knowledge of the principles of justice. What, sir, have they gained principles of justice from us? Their civilization brought about by us!

Yes, we give them enough of our intercourse to convey to them the means, and to initiate them into the study, of mutual destruction. We give them just enough of the forms of justice to enable them to add the pretext of legal trials to their other modes of perpetrating the most atrocious iniquity. Some evidences say that the Africans are addicted to the practice of gambling; that they even sell their wives and children, and ultimately themselves. Are these, then, the legitimate sources of slavery? Shall we pretend that we can thus acquire an honest right to exact the labor of these people? Can we pretend that we have a right to carry away to distant regions men of whom we know nothing by authentic inquiry, and of whom there is every reasonable presumption to think, that those who sell them to us have no right to do so? But the evil does not stop here. Do you think nothing of the ruin and the miseries in which so many other individuals, still remaining in Africa, are involved, in consequence of carrying off so many myriads of people? Do you think nothing of their families which are left behind? of the connections which are broken? of the friendships, attachments, and relationships that are burst asunder! Do you think nothing of the miseries in consequence that are felt from generation to generation? of the privation of that happiness which might be communicated to them by the introduction of civilization, and of mental and moral improvement? A happiness which you withhold from them so long as you permit the slave-trade to continue. What do you know of the internal state of Africa? You have carried on a trade to that quarter of the globe from this civilized and enlightened country; but such a trade, that, instead of diffusing either knowledge or wealth, it has been the check to every laudable pursuit. Instead of any fair interchange of commodities; instead of conveying to them, from this highly favored land, any means of improvement; you carry with you that noxious plant by which everything is withered and blasted; under whose shade nothing that is useful or profitable to Africa will ever flourish or take root. Long as that continent has been known to navigators, the extreme line and boundaries of its coasts is all with which Eu