[1] In emotive and graphic language, it urged Britons to boycott the produce of enslaved Africans in the British West Indies, claiming: "A family that uses only 5lb.
Calumny itself cannot charge a single member of the British Legislature with being so far contaminated with French Principles, as to propose restoring the Slaves in our Islands to the benefits of civil society, and the protection of its laws.
"[4] Fox asserted that enslaved Africans should be emancipated regardless of whatever consequences might ensue: "notwithstanding the unmeaning clamour which [Edmund] Burke has raised against abstract principles, I mean to contend, That 'No circumstances, or situation, in society, can justify the subjecting a human being, as a property, to his fellow-creature; or the continuance of such a state, where it already exists' ... Slavery is ... inimical to all government.
Gradualism, in the sense of a reliance on indirect and slow-working means to achieve a desired social objective, was the logical consequence of fundamental attitudes toward progress, natural law, property, and individual rights.
"[6] Historian Padraic X. Scanlan, in his Freedom's Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution, further notes that "by focusing on the slave trade as a target for immediate abolition, abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic could put off the difficult question of what post-emancipation society would be like, preserve plantation economies, and coddle politically powerful planters.