CHAPTER XX.
Labours of the committee during the author's journey; Quakers the first to notice its institution; General Baptists the next .-- Correspondence opened with American societies for Abolition .-- First individual who addressed the committee was Mr.
William Smith .-- Thanks voted to Ramsay .-- Committee prepares lists of persons to whom to send its publications; Barclay, Taylor, and Wedgewood, elected members of the committee .-- Letters from Brissot and others .-- Granville Sharp elected chairman,--Seal ordered to be engraved .-- Letters from different correspondents, as they offered their services to the committee.
The committee, during my absence, had attended regularly at their posts; they had been both vigilant and industrious; they were, in short, the persons who had been the means of raising the public spirit which I had observed first at Manchester, and afterwards as I journeyed on.

It will be proper, therefore, that I should now say something of their labours, and of the fruits of them: and if, in doing this, I should be more minute for a few pages than some would wish, I must apologize for myself by saying, that there are others who would be sorry to lose the knowledge of the particular manner in which the foundation was laid, and the superstructure advanced, of a work which will make so brilliant an appearance in our history, as that of the abolition of the Slave Trade.
The committee having dispersed five hundred circular letters, giving an account of their institution in London and its neighbourhood, the Quakers were the first to notice it.

This they did in their yearly epistle, of which the following is an extract:--"We have also thankfully to believe there is a growing attention in many, not of our religious society, to the subject of negro slavery; and that the minds of the people are more and more enlarged to consider it as an aggregate of every species of evil, and to see the utter inconsistency of upholding it by the authority of any nation whatever, especially of such as punish, with loss of life, crimes whose magnitude bears scarce any proportion to this complicated iniquity." The General Baptists were the next; for on the 22nd of June, Stephen Lowdell and Dan Taylor attended as a deputation from the annual meeting of that religious body, to inform the committee, that those whom they represented approved their proceedings, and that they would countenance the object of their institution.
The first individual who addressed the committee was Mr.William Smith, the late member for Norwich.

In his letter, he expressed the pleasure he had received in finding persons associated in the support of a cause in which he himself had taken a deep interest.

He gave them advice as to their future plans.