Wealth & Money Quote by George Grey

Abolition isn’t framed here as a moral awakening waiting to happen; it’s treated as an economic impossibility wearing the costume of civic respectability. Grey’s line works because it names the real sovereign in the room: not law, not church, not public conscience, but the ledger. By locating responsibility with “all the principal people,” he punctures any comforting story that slavery is the work of a few villains on the margins. It’s an ecosystem run by the town’s elites, with prestige and prosperity literally counted in human bodies. The syntax is clinical, almost bureaucratic, and that coolness is part of the rhetorical force: it mimics the tone of governance to expose what governance has normalized.

The subtext is blunt and corrosive. If the “principal people” are invested, reform isn’t just unpopular; it threatens the social order that defines who gets to be “principal” at all. Grey implies that abolition will be delayed not by ignorance but by self-interest enforced through influence: these are the people who finance campaigns, sit on councils, shape newspapers, and decide what counts as “common sense.”

Context matters, too. As a 19th-century leader moving through imperial networks, Grey is describing slavery not as a distant atrocity but as an integrated local economy. His “therefore” is a prosecutor’s move: cause and consequence, wealth and power, fused. The sentence leaves you with an uncomfortable forecast - not because Grey doubts abolition’s righteousness, but because he understands how slowly societies surrender profitable crimes.