" Pitt himself had declared that he could think of no greater evil than ‘the tearing of seventy or eighty thousand persons annually from their native land, by a combination of the most civilised nations, inhabiting the most enlightened quarter of the globe’.29 There was no nation in Europe, he went on, ‘that has, on the one hand, plunged so deeply into this guilt as Britain, or that is so likely, on the other, to be looked to as an example, if she should have the manliness to be the first in decidedly renouncing it’. "

― Jenny Uglow , In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon's Wars, 1793–1815