WEST INDIA SLAVERY.
TOPICS OF THE DAY.
A MEETING, of what description of persons we do not anticipate, is, we are told, to be held on Tuesday, for the purpose of petitioning Per_ iiament and the King to adopt the recommendation of Mr. OTWAy CAVE respecting Slaves in the West Indies. There is something Irish —seeming in petitioning Parliament during the prorogation ; and per- haps this attempt to second Mr. CAVES motion from without, since no one was found to second it from within, may originate with sonic philanthropic gentleman from the green land. We do not think, that an assembly so collected requires a lengthened notice ; but as the plan of Mr. CAVE is again pressed on our attention, we shall consider it very briefly.
Mr. CAVE proposes that all the children of slave parents in the British West Indies, born after the 1st January 1830, shall be free. Taking the average length of Negro life in the West Indies to be about forty years, the whole population would be free in forty years hence ; but divided into periods of ten years each, the ratio of emancipation would be pretty nearly 16 —12-8-4 ; so that in twenty years time would be three-fourths of the slaves emancipated. it seems quite in- consistent with human nature, that when three-fourths of these people had attained freedom, they should tolerate slavery in thlheroelme t(r)f h iittinge fourth ; and as the latter portion must comprehend the v aged and feeble, and but a small portion of the active and vigorous, it is difficult to see what rational opposition the planters could offer to their immediate manumission. Although, therefore, Mr. CAVE'S pro- posal is intended to come into complete operation in forty years, it is reasonable to assume that practically it would set free the whole NeoTo population of the West Indies in twenty years. It might be a suffi- cient objection to this wholesale measure, that the history of the world oilers no corresponding example of transition from bondage to liberty ; that there is an infancy and a youth of intellect as well as of years, and that men who are incapable of 'guiding themselves stand as much in need of superintendence as children do. That the Negroes of lieWcst Indies should be capable of relishing or maintaining a free form of government with so -brief a training as their inconsiderate friends would bestow upon them, will appear incredible to the most careless, when he reflects how' small a portion of real liberty exists in most of the states of the Old World, notwithstanding many centuries of prepa- ration for its enjoyment. One of two things, then, can hardly fail to take place, at the end of the twenty or thirty years contemplated in Mr. CAVE'S proposition as the &limns terminus of slavery,—either the Whites must be supprted by the Government at home in the exer- cise of their dominion over the free Negroes, as they now are in the exercise of their dominion over the slave Negroes; or the Whites must leave the West Indies altogether. It is obvious that by the first of these alternatives the intended emancipation is neither more not-less than a modification of bondage ; and that all the advantages it pro- poses to confer may be, and in all human probability will be, gained in a shorter space of time by a patient and judicious revision of the slave code, by facilitating voluntary manumission, by the careful instruction of the Black population, by the encouragement of marriages, and lastly and chiefly, by the gradual conversion of field Negroes into ascriiiii olebev. There is indeed a distinction between the two methods : the one proposed by Mr. CAVE would necessarily be accompanied by great anxiety, by divisions and strifes endless, by the ruin of many estates, the deterioration of all ; whilst that which nature and history, and we may add common sense alike dictate, would lead happily, quietly, and safely to the same end. The other alternative, which under Mr. CAVE'S management we look upon as much the more likely of the two, would be the expulsion of the Whites altogether. Now suppose that we were inclined to throw out of consideration the terrible destruction of pro- perty consequent on such an expulsion, the widely-extended misery it would cause to hundreds of thousands of families, the commercial dis- tresses that would flow from it, and the permanent injury it would not fail to inflict on the commerce of the count ry,—suppose, in a word, that we were to admit that the sufferings of White men were nothing, and the comforts of Black men everything,—still the question would arise, Is Mr. CAVE'S plan the best calculated to insure the happiness of Black men? We cannot better answer this question than by asking our readers to look to Hayti, the largest and most diversified of the West India Islands, and say what progress in the science of government has been made there. Look to its code rural, by which a system of wholesale slavery is made part and parcel of the law of the republic ! Yet Hayti had its peculiar advantages : many persons of Colour, and many Blacks, had risen to public consideration long before the decree of the Convention emancipated the slaves ; it possessed the elements of government, if not of liberty ; the people were not all of equal stature, —there was here and there a Saul to be found among them. Grant- ing that Jamaica were capable of emulating the sorry example that Hispaniola has set, what would become of the smaller islands, when deprived of every one to whom the population had been accustomed to look up with respect or fear ? " Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod shall drive it far from him," says the wise man. Uncivilized man is but a child of larger growth ; and with him, as with the child in years, physical restraint is the natural and necessary preparative to moral restraint. Those who would invert the order of nature—who would begin by the latter with a17o!-111.ation that neither feels nor understands its obligations, are but :• eta; pearls before swine, and may confidently expect the return cP persons so em- ployed.
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