At a General Meeting of the Glasgow Society on 1 February 1792, with Dale in the Chair, the members resolved;…"that the traffic in the human species is founded on the grossest injustice, is attended with the utmost cruelty and barbarity to an innocent race of men and is productive of ruin and desolation of a country which the efforts of the well-directed industry of Great Britain might contribute to civilise."On Commerce and the Enlightenment:"slave trade…is directly repugnant to the primary laws of nature…and that its continuance, in this enlightened age, is disgraceful to the nation and utterly inconsistant" (sic) "with the profession of Christians."It is surely to Dale’s credit that he took a public stand against slavery when so many in the city refused to do so. It was risky in that he did not want to alienate the people with whom he required to do business and he required to do business to keep hundreds of people in employment and to support many more people through his charitable work. Moral positions in the late 18th century were not always clear cut. Robert Burns, often see as the champion of equality, was just days away from leaving these shores to work as a bookkeeper (often a synonym for ‘overseer’) in a Jamaican plantation. In the U.S., Washington and Jefferson, the advocates of freedom and liberty for all, were both slave owners. Closer to home, David Hume, Scotland’s famous philosopher of the liberal Enlightenment, took a rather less liberal view of things when he wrote that ‘there never was a polished society but of the white race, to which all others are naturally inferior’ and that ‘…there never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white’. Dale, like all the other mill owners, used slave cotton but, unlike all the others, did what he could to begin the process of abolishing the slave trade. Had more of his colleagues joined him, abolition might not have taken such a long time.