Apart from his literary influence, it can hardly be doubted that Edwards very materially moulded Park’s views on at least one important subject--the slave trade. At that time the question of abolition had become a burning one in the country, and Edwards was one of the warmest advocates of the old order of things. He would give Africa Light, but no Liberty. While actively employed in trying to open up the Dark Continent to European influence, he strenuously strove to ensure that that influence should remain of the most criminal and degrading nature.
Let the reader imagine what would have been the consequence to Africa if the advocates of slavery had had their way, and the exploration of the Continent had only been the forerunner of more widespread ramifications of the slave trade. However incredible it may appear, such might easily have been the case. People once accustomed to an evil soon forget that it is such, and begin to look upon it as one of the necessary and unavoidable ills of life. Take, for example, the survival of the African gin trade to this very day, increasing and flourishing long after its dissociation from its well-matched sister traffic in slaves, and everywhere dogging the explorer’s footsteps. It is doubtful if even the slave trade has done more to brutalise and degrade the negro; and yet even in our time there is only a partial awakening to the frightful evils of the iniquitous traffic.
This culpable blindness or carelessness on our part is doubtless largely fostered by the comforting and comfortable belief that our missionaries are doing a great and noble work in Africa, and that mere contact with the European and European commerce must of necessity have an elevating effect upon the lower races. The truth is that for every negro nominally or genuinely brought under the influence of Christianity, ten thousand have been driven by drink to depths of moral and physical depravity unheard of among uncontaminated native tribes, and that so far contact with the European and his commerce has resulted not in elevation to the African, but in degradation of the most loathsome kind.
To what extent Park was really influenced in his opinions on the slave question by Edwards it would be difficult to say. It matters little, however, for whether he really believed in the righteousness of slavery or was merely reasoned into neutrality, his position was equally indefensible. Nay, more, if, as his friends say, he really believed that the trade was an unjust one, the position he assumed was nothing more nor less than criminal. These urge, as if it were an extenuating circumstance, that in private conversation he even expressed the greatest abhorrence of the traffic. This, it must be confessed, seems improbable. Such an attitude is utterly unlike what we should expect from a man of Park’s marked individuality and strong earnest truthfulness. Moreover, it seems sufficiently clear that the public opinion of his day ascribed to him a belief in the righteousness of the principle of slavery, and if it was wrong, it seems strange that he took no means to correct it. But that it was not wrong seems evident from a speech delivered on the Abolition of the Slave Trade by George Hibbert in Parliament in 1803.