To the rational as well as earnest enemies of Slavery
and friends or Africa, we recommend the perusal of a paper in the current number of the -Westminster Review, written by as sincere an Abolitionist as any one of them, wino acquired his knowledge of Africa and its inhabitants by personal experience in the region to which the Niger Expedition is destined. We quote from the conclusions which he arrives at, after an elaborate and patient dissection of the notions of Mr. Buxton and Mr. Turnbull-
" Suppose Mr. Buxton's plan curried into effect, and fifty Sierra Leona created on the coast and interior of Africa, will the slave•trade he lentil& hued ?—We think not ; it will only shift its quarter. Cut off in the North, it will Ily to the South, from the West to the East coast. Nothing but declaring it piracy, or a cordon of forts and possession of the whole seabord of Allies, will stop it by fume—ef the ilenni;id continua: as it is truly said, ' the profits of the slave-trade will defy all our efforts.'
" Are we than to wait until Mr. Buxton has, by his missionaries, schools, pattern.larins, agricultuval and benevolent societies, so raised the mind and morals of the African race, that they will, of their own accord, stop slave. trading ? A tal while waiting for this great revolution in the habits, manners, and feelings of a people numbering one hundred millions and ishabiting one- fourth of the globe, are we to gu on protecting our new colonits, increasitig our squadrons, spending another 15,1100,000i. in trying an experiment which Ina already signally filled at Sierra Leone, even under the fostering superin- tendence of the Macaulay family, with the patronage of an expensive Govern- ment establishment, and all the advantages of an abundant supply of labour at 41, per diem ?
" Is this then ' The Remedy ? ' Ill addition to the continuance of our pre- sent syst.!am, with all its cruelties, are we, with the 'hay-eight years' expert. owe It' Sierra Leone, to coininclice anew the same career, NA ith eV, ry probabia lily of thirty years hence being welly informed by some Nine Minister tithe Crown ' that it I. indispensable to enter upon some new proantive system'; and by same hew ' Society for the Extinctiun of the Stive-trade ' warned net to find litult—' Let no man, however, say that these efforts have been thrown away '? We deny that there is any thing new in this touch-vaunted ' Re. needy ' : nothing in the present system is tutiched,—Mixed Commission Coons, preventive squadrons are left intact ; and added to them, we have a grand scheme of a colonizing experiment, founded on the same principles in which Sierra Leone was founded halt' a century ago, and we firmly belie ,c destined to a the same lamentble failure. * * * * " We think there are two ways of extinguishing the demand for slaves; one instantaneous, the other by the operation of natural causes. We will state them both.
"1st. By declaring the carrying of slaves ou the high seas an offence against the law of tuitions, and punishable by any. "2d. By making free labour cheep, r than slave labour.
(if the efficacy of the first plan there can be no reasonable doubt. Treat the slave-trader as a pirate, and the seas will he soon as clear of them as they now am of pirates ; and it would also he the quickest way of stepping the evil,— a point of no small inquiet sure when the annual waste of life and amount of suffering is considered. " Are we ready to do this ? We think not. The declaring the traffic in slaves (.0 long considered chattels in the eyes of our own law, and by all na- tions, till within the last few years) piracy, would be equivalent to (lel:hiring war against the world, and would sooner or later be followed by an general ma- ritime war. (Already the French are escorting their Black pioneers, as they delicately term them, with men of wid. from Cioree to Caytnne.) This would be the first result, and one we much deprecate. flowerer' notch we are con- vinced of the sinfulness of the trellis, we have 110 right to force our core- thms mum ethers. The end we p.opo:;e is good, but that dues not justify us in arriving at it by unlawful means. To procure the assent of other nations to ileclaritig the slave-trade piracy is just possible; but they weasel never con- sent to our cm:v.1161,g judgment on their citizens ; and experieuce has shown that we are the only nation who will really punish its subjects for engagiog in the trade. " This cure, which we may call the ' actual cautery,' therefore cannot lie had ; it will be talked at; threatened, and held in ferrorem, but it will never be applied. The making free cheaper than slave labour, is, therefore, our only hope. It will be slow, (therefore we desiderated the former,) but sure; and it has the great advatitage over all systems of tonne, that it strikes at once at the very foundations of not only the slave-trsde, but slavery itself : the first sample of free-labite sugar shown in the London market, at the same price and quality as that of the I favatnialt or Brazil, would sound the knell of the shave-trade and slavery. It is a peaceful cure : no one can quarrel with us for growling cot ton, sugar, or coffee, at as low a rate as possible. It is a cheap cure :.!t does African ; it requires no Judges of Mixed Commission Courts to rattle the of life, any mot require any grants of public money, any lavish expenditure naval squadron to enliwee it. It is a tneretful cure: it does not involve the increased misery and suffering which our present system beings upon the poor dice-box to ascertain whether a fellow creature is a slave or a freeman. And, above all fitness, it is a mire founded on principles that still endure for ever> without the aid of treaties and negotiations to support them.'There . no doubt the earn is ,ifilicient, it' it can be applied: and here we think its chief excellesee lies—that it is itt our poster to begin applying it immediately, with- out even Lord Clarendon's going to Madrid. 6, The British Colonies in the 'vest Indies are, we think, destined to become Me means not only of putting down slavery and the. slave-trade, but also ig4' ciciliziug Africa. They are at present languishing for want of a plentiful sup- ply of labour, without which no country or colony can ever arrive at prosperity. The effects are seen in the falling-off in the amount of surplus protium they raise 501 export to this country. In 1829, the imports of sugar from the Bri- tish plantations were 271,700 hogsheads, and the Gazette average price 23s. 2d. per hundredweight ; in 1839, the imports had fallen to 179.800 hogsheads, and the Gazette average price risen to 37s. 7,1d.; showing a falling-off in the pro- duction of nearly 100,000 hogsheads, and a rise in the price paid to the planter by the people of Great Britain of rather more than fifty per cent. It is very clear that at the present prices we cannot compete with produce grown by slave- labour. Now, there is no doubt that our West India Cohmies are capable of raishigstillicient produce to supply the whole of Europe. There are three ele- ments or prosperity present—the ground, the capital, and skill ; all that is wanting is at numerous, hardy, industrious peasantry. This we have the power of giving them, by granting equal laws and privileges to all inhabitants of our 'West India Colonies, without distinction of colour. To promulgate, in fact, a Bill of Rights, a Magna Charta for the Coloured Mall who takes refuge under our ling, from the injustice and oppression he meets with elsewhere—this would at once make our West India Colonies what they ought to lie, magnets that would attract the free Coloured population front all parts or the American Union, the sFinish and Portuguese :,•tileinents, the South .1 merican repub- lics, wherever colour Iva,: made the ground of any civil or political disability. And no on this national guarantee for equal rights the success of the plait must entirely turn, it should be put beyond the reach of the planter hr a solemn and deliberate act of the Imperial Guterman, nt. 'What objection then could there be to a tree and unlimited entigri.t ion to the West Indies of the Coloured race front all parts of the: world They arc emigrating to a British colony, where their political and coil rights are gum:moved. Supposing they coin! Crum the United States, where they are, if possilde, worse oil' than the actual slaves, and MT subject to the most galling and contemptuous conduct, which is every day becoming MOM and more intolerable, and with less prospect of amendmeat ; they laud in one of our Colonies, get immediate employment at high wages, and become at once members of it tree Black conommity, with all the rip ht: and privileges of citizens. Supposing they come front Sierra Leone, where labour is at 4r1. a day, to Trinidad, where, we may say, we presume, that 1;11,4,111• is at 10d. per day, will it not be a direct benefit to that amount to the besides 'being him in contact with civilized society, and teaching him a trait Supposing he collies from any part of die (mast of Africa. does lie not escape the risk of being enslaved, torn from his home by fre., or his having children and wife stolen during his absence from his but e We have nut rendered his home secure; it has been proved we cannot do it in Africa ; but we can offer him a safe asylum in our Colonies.
"There is a morbid feeling that any thing that benefits the planter must of
necessity injure the Negro. We caonot enter into this fueling at all : it is absurd to suppose that it the great primmiple of equal rights was conceded to the free Negro, these rights could he taken away from tin without the knots ledge of the Imperial Government that hall gral tell them ; now Hutt in a twelve- month we arc to have a line of steam-pack, ts t i the West Indies twice a month, that will bring them within a fortnight's sail of this country. The only diffi- culty we can see is in the transportation to the West !miles. We would allow no individual to speculate in the imyortation of free emigrants—not even the 'Gladstone' of • hill Cooly' notoriety. The whole should be under the con- trol of the Government; equal numbers should he taken of both sexes; no contracts should be allowed for a greater time than twelvemonths ; and the N. gra should always have tl.c right of demanding a passage back from when: e lie come,—the expen of course would be borne by the colony to which the emigration took place,—which would always keep up the price of labour, as no more would he imported than could be employed. "The consequence of such measures would, we firmly believe, create in our West India Colonies, in a few years, such an extent of production that our planters would be able to compete with the slave-holders. Why should they not? they are barked by the wealth of Crest Britain, ready for investment wherever a pro'it is to be fouod. They have in Trinidad and Guiana two colo- nies that we ild alone grow more sugar than the whole world at present pro- duces. They have the skill, experience, capital fixed mid tloatin, that has been created or transplanted there fur the last tie" centuries; and they would, if. the British Government approved of it, get their free labour front the i■ited states, or the African coast, for one-filth part of what the slave-bolder pay for his slave. bias any Abolitionist fear of the result of this competition then dies he doubt the truth of the principle that led him to abolish slavery in our possessions? Does he doubt the possibility of guarding the Negro lab purer from oppression in our West India Colonies? how much more must he doubt the practicability of doing it hi those proposed by Mr. Buxton, wb, r the slave-trade wouid be raging on all sides? But Wile b.dieves that the linlon,ne of a free man is equal to that of the slave—that it is better the Negro should labour under the eye of the British public in the West fluidics than in the Sierra leones and Liberias proposed to he erected in ii is only ho de- stroying the demand tbr slaves that we can ext ingnish the shvo-trode, amt that this can only be accomplished by underselling the slave-holdas in the markets of Europe,—then we adjure him to look well into the remedies prop(-ad before he commits himself to then by swelling with his voice, or assisting With his purse, the cry and the deniand that is about to be raised for their adm alum * * " If no free and unfettered communication were opened between Africa and the West Indies, and the Negro allowed, as we have pr,,posed, a free passage to and from thence, in a few years there would be hundreds, nay thousands, retooling to the land of Hide birth with their savings. These men, having been treated as free men in our Colonies, would tiring hack with them the knowledge they had acquired during their stay there, and impart it to their countrymen. And when the result is accomplished that we are all looking to, viz. the destruction of the slave-trade by (lie peaceful operation of the plan we have described, Africa would be in the possession of it large population speaking the English language, accustomed to English laws and habits, ac- quainted with Colonial agriculture, ready for the application of English capital to the cultivation of the soil, and ripe for the exertions of missionaries. philan- thropists, and of all those who are anxious for the improvement of their fellow creatures."
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