SUGAR AND SLAVERY.
A SURVEY of the present state of the Sugar question exhibits the several conflicting "interests" or parties to it in a most unsatis- factory light. To begin with the largest, the British public has not gained much by the many party and sectarian manceuvres which 'have been achieved under a high-sounding name. The public paid for Emancipation, and a badly-fulfilled bargain ; it has paid long for "slave-trade suppression," as the fruitless and costly efforts to sup- press the slave-trade are called; it pays a high price for sugar, to pro- tect the West Indies from ruin, which is not done ; it pays all round, and purchases—what ? Nothing but mortification. And now, the only tangible gain even promised to the public, as a consequence of the contemplated change in the duties, is an estimated fall of some- thing more than a halfpenny per pound in the price of sugar. The public may partly blame itself; for it has been passive, if not active, in buying at any price the luxury of sentiment—in shedding tears over the name of slavery, getting up projects to quash it, and con- senting to blink the fact, that, for all the outlay, there is as much slavery as ever.
The next interest most obviously concerned is that of the West
India proprietors,—including in the term, mortgagees and others dependent upon West Indian property ; for we cannot understand the morality, or the sense, of a distinction implied in contemptuous allusions to "mortgages," between different kinds of property and vested capital. The position of the West Indian colonists is not enviable. The day of reckoning has come, and, like the sluggard, they are unprepared, except with entreaties for "more time." They are exposed to all the damaging effect of the truths mixed up with the fallacies of the Free-traders : " protection " is a bad and hollow system ; it does conduce to inertness and helpless reliance on arti- ficial props; and the West Indians have been inert enough. Put out of sight what we have done to the West Indies, and they have no claim to what they ask us to do for them. But it is not so easy to put out of sight our long course of meddling. If we had not interfered in the details of their industrial arrangements, the " mo- nopoly " with which we reproach them would have been swept away at this day among other monopolies; and without detriment to the West Indies, for it was once only nominal. With a free re- sort to the labour of slaves, they produced sugar in such abundance that there was a surplus for other markets than ours, and that abundance gave England the cheapest sugar in Europe. Their -" protection" was inoperative, like that of the Lancashire cotton- manufacturer at this day. And when, after the war, Trinidad and a part of Guiana were added to our territory, the acquisition of those fertile fields would have more than compensated for any in- crease of our population for ages. Already able to grow sugar enough, the British colonies obtained an unlimited increase to their resources of soil. Possessing British skill and capital as well as fertile soil, they were more than equal to cope with any rivals in the world. We altered that state of things ; first by prohibiting the slave-trade, then by enacting Negro apprenticeship, then by break- ing the apprenticeship : we deprived the West Indies of their means a production. The amount of labour was just enough for their wants; but the population that had sufficed while all labour was compul- sorily bent to one task, the growth of Tropical produce for our mar- ket, became insufficient as soon as that compulsion ceased ; the labourers falling off to other occupations, retiring to their own little plots of land, going into trade, or otherwise bringing about that "blessed change" which delighted Lord JOHN RUSSELL four years ago, and ruined the West Indies as a property. Trinidad is over- run with Black squatters; Jamaica is peopled by a nation of half- holyday-makers, who have so much amusement to do that they have little time for work. Labour being scarce—continuous labour, at certain seasons in the process of sugar-making, being peremptorily needed—wages have risen to sums which no longer represent the intrinsic value of the labour, but the exigency of the employer; and Mr. JAMES told the House of Commons the other night, that sugar which it cost him fourpence the pound to grow and threepence to pass through our Customhouse, sells for sixpence-halfpenny—a loss of a halfpenny on every pound produced. The House laughed at the name of that low coin : but there would be little laughing if bread were sold at a loss to the landowner of one halfpenny in the pound weight. Proprietors have been sending out from this country money and implements, to keep their estates going, in hopes of better times: but that cannot go on for aye—the better times do not come, and some already stop their supplies. It is now pro- posed, by way of favour, to deprive them even of hope. That is the position in which the West India proprietors have suffered themselves to be put : but it is we who have put them there. To be honest, we should have equalized the Sugar-duties before we meddled with the labour-market ; and then there would have been either a more successful resistance to Emancipation, or a wiser preparation for it.
The Blacks of Africa, in whose favour the crusade has been car- ried on, are likely to fare no better than the British people who pay or the West India proprietors who are plundered. The Afri- can race are peculiarly adapted to the climate and occupations of The American archipelago : they stand toil and the climate better than the aborigines did. The proximity of the African continent, the shortness of the voyage, and the small cost of conveying pas-
seugers across the narrowest part of the Atlantic, point out Africa as the legitimate offleina gentium for the West Indies. Free emi- gration, however, has been checked and trammeled as if it were something to be discouraged—an indulgence for the planters, bad in itself, and only to be allowed on sufferance and to a minimized extent. Why ? Slave-owning countries continue to draw an annual supply from Africa ; and inasmuch as Europe must have sugar, we, by restricting the number of free emigrants, do our best to secure that the sugar shall be made by the Negro as a slave in Brazil or Cuba, rather than by the same Negro as a free man in the British West Indies. The native condition of the Negro in Africa is, for the most part, deplorable : the savage chiefs exercise despotic will over life and limb ; even the sanctity of Exeter Hall's "model farm" up the Niger could not repel the taint of slavery which pervades that whole continent, and which has existed East and West, North and South, from the earliest dawn of history— from the time of the Pharaohs, if not from the Deluge. Many of the tribes are in the most bestial state : when captured by our cruisers, they are found to behave like mere brutes. For them, even the slave-labour of civilized countries is an elevation. In the Bra- zils, the slave associates with his master's family, and is at least as well off and as well conducted as an Arab horse. We judge of slavery in the United States by our standards of right and senti- ment; but turn one of these brutes into a Virginian Negro, and he would rise many degrees in the scale of humanity. In the English West Indies, the Negro attains to the same comforts, immunities, and dignity, as any British subject. Is it not clear that the mere fact of removal from Africa to the British West Indies must be for the Negro tribes the best possible change ? What " protection " do they need more than British emigrants crossing the ocean ? Secure their personal rights within British jurisdiction, open every portal to that magic bound, render their migration safe, and you have done the very best 3 ou can for them. Even the human brutes, that we have seen described, at their transfer from the slave-ships, in terms which, though of unimpeachable truth, may not appear in our pages, become passing good citizens. They arc highly imi- tative, with a strong social turn. Their mere removal from native oppression, and from debasing example, acts like regeneration. All this civilizing influence is obstructed by whatever impedes—and hitherto every act of the Government, from its head in Downing Street to its tail in Sierra Leone, has impeded—the free passage of Blacks from Mica to the British West Indies.
The Anti-Slavery party in this country is not in a more favour- able position than those already passed under review. Apart from the originators of the movement—the CLARKSONS and Wisnes- FORCES, who stand distinguished from the mere herd as much as the great men who have founded philosophical or religious sects do from mere sectarians—this party may be held to consist of the excitable masses who follow the bellwethers of the flock, of the busy managers in Exeter Hall, and of those whose professional interest in the blockade of the African coast vulgarizes but at the same time keeps alive their hostility to slavery and slavers. With the exception of the last-mentioned not very numerous section, the Anti-Slavery body have been brought to a dead lock. They have abolished personal slavery within the British dominions; they have put an end to the avowed participation of British subjects in the slave-trade ; they have involved the country in treaties for the sup- pression of that traffic, which keep it continually hovering on the verge of wars : but they have neither diminished the amount of slavery in the world nor materially crippled the African slave, trade. They stand there at their wits-end, unable to devise any means of advancing their object, and, in ignorance or out of spleen, ob- structing all means proposed by other persons.
Last comes our Government; in a plight quite as unsatisfactory as that of any of the others, and on the whole more shameful. In every stage, the part which the British Government has taken in the controversies relating to slavery and the Tropical Colonies has been undignified at the best. Government has been simply passive: it has neither originated any thing nor engrafted the suggestions it re- ceived from without upon a statesmanlike system of its own. Whigs and Tories, when in office, have on these questions justified the un- intentional sarcasm of Mr. ZACIIARY MACAULAY', when, writing to a noble friend about Sierra Leone, he affirmed that the people in the Colonial Office would " do any thing for anybody who saved them the trouble of thinking." Government has never taken one step with regard to the Sugar Colonies unless from the belief that the pressure brought to bear upon it was irresistible, and then in blind obedience to the impulse. Its first phasis was that of 3 ; and consequently, its second was that of blundering. Instead of taking a comprehensive view of the wants and w ishes of the general Public, the Planters, the Negroes, and the Anti-Slavers, and originating measures which might as far as possible harmonize them, it has merely given way to the urgency of the most active, and has acted upon their narrow views without having the excuse that it believed in them. And now that necessity is making other parties clamorous, it passes from blundering to shuffling. It professes to do something for all parties, and does nothing satisfactory for any. It cajoles the sugar-consumer, by promising to admit larger supplies of sugar; it hastens to sooth the apprehensions of the Anti-Slaver, by protesting that not an ounce of slave-grown sugar shall be allowed to enter; and it keeps neither promise, for the additional supply and the exclusion of slave-grown sugar will to all appearance prove equally illusory. It promises protection to the Planter; it whispers the Free-trader that the protection shall be only nominal; and it hits upon a medium which deprives the consumer of his anticipated benefit, and the producer of a re-
munerative price. Lastly, it flatters the Planter with the hope of additional supplies of free labour, and stops the mouth of the Anti-Slaver by interposing such impediments as render the concession a cheat. Four years have elapsed since Lord JOHN Roseau recognized the justice of permitting the spontaneous emigration of free labourers from Western Africa to the West Indies ; it is almost three years since Lord STANLEY entered office, and became a responsible actor in the matter : 'up to the close of last year, the total supply of labourers added to the population of the West Indies by emigration from Africa had scarcely exceeded 3,000; of which number, the pro- portion added under Lord STANLEY'S rule has been less than one-third—about 900.* And amid all his shuffling—his make- believe to do something while he had practically hindered any- thing from being done—Lord STANLEY takes credit to himself for affording the colonists the means of preparing to meet competition! Tbe chance which restores Lord STANLEY, who made the transition from the yielding to the bungling period, to office in time to make the transition from the bungling to the shuffling, lends an epic unity to the whole transaction. His name is of bad omen for the Sugar Colonies and the African race. The task of taking the next delicate and difficult step in this perplexed and mismanaged busi- ness, devolves upon the very Minister whose showy incapacity and timid rashness gave a wrong direction to the experiment of Eman- cipation at the outset.
The liberated Africans, who have been conveyed to our Colonies within the last three or four years, do not belong to the category of spontaneous emigra- tion. They are, in strictness, little better than slaves stolen from others to be bled in our own way ; and their number is trifling. First and last, there have been about 2,000 liberated Africans conveyed from St. Helena to the West Indies ; 1,500 fiom Rio Janeiro ; and about 400 landed at Dominica—most of them very young, many mere children. The total emigration from Sierra Leone—whence, only. emigration has been permitted—amounts, up to the latest Marna, to about 3,297. Jamaica had received 1,426; Trinidad, 1,120; and Guiana, 751. To convey these, in small detachments, scattered over a space - of three years, three first-rate ships have been employed, each having on board a Navy Lieutenant and Surgeon, with large salaries. The expense has in con- sequence been so disproportionately great, that the people of Guiana have paid off their transport, and those of Trinidad intend to follow the example unless the current voyage of their ship prove more successful. Before Lord STAN. LET regulations of February 1843, private vessels, properly equipped, had been engaged in conveying emigrants from Africa to the West Indies; and they managed to he more successful than the Government-ships have been. But the Anti-Slavery people, abetted by the Authorities, raised a commotion, and contrived difficulties; and the emigration as now regulated is the substi- tute, but not the equivalent, for that which was stopped.
While such has been the addition to the free Negro population of the British Colonies in three or four years, tens of thousands of slaves are annually im- ported into Cuba!
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