Itittro to t4t Rita.
THE WEST INDIAN Ql7ESTION.
addressing you as the self-appointed advocate of the West In- dies, my position is both navel and dangerous. It is dangerous, because I may not be able to do full justice to the important interests I seek to benefit, and which might suffer irremediable harm from an insufficient or a weak argument, and it is novel, because for many years every writer and speaker, who wished to impress the public with the liberality of his sentiments and the goodness of his heart, has attacked his countrymen in the West Indies. The most handy means for the accomplishment of so desirable an object, to denounce our sugar-farmers, has long been a safe and easy way. to the acquisition of cheap popularity. Habit, which is a second nature is stronger than reason, and vehement declamation against the West Indians is a habit dating from the time when the great question of slavery and freedom was pending between Great Britain and her Ocean Empire in the West. Long after the country had resolved to rid it- self of the curse of slavery, the colonists held out, first, for their vested interests ; afterwards, for compensation. There was nothing magnanimous or romantic in thisproceeding, but also nothing that could expose them to the censure of reckless depravity. No right, no interest, no profit, no pro- perty in this country, has ever been sacrificed to the public good or to su- perior views of public morality, without an obstinate resistance on the part a those interested in the nuisance, and without adequate compensation being claimed, and given. It is true that the right of property in human beings has been represented as altogether exceptional. Lord Brougham, in a burst of forensic eloquence, set the example of utterly scouting the idea of any man having a right of property in his fellowmen. This emphatic de- claration is more honourable to his Lordship's kindness of heart than to his understanding as a lawyer. Disgraceful and humiliating as it may appear incur days, this right of property in our fellowmen was recognized by the law of the land ; the Legislature enacted laws to regulate, or alter, or revise the relations between the proprietor and his human property ; and if a colo- nist died intestate, the law took cognizance of the number and the value of his slaves, and apportioned them or their value among the various claimants to his property ; if a colonist failed, the law valued his slaves among his ether assets; if a colonist was sued in damages for a breach of promise of marriage, the value of his slaves was quoted among other property to enable the jury to assess the exact amount of the fine he ought to pay. It is a pleasant fiction to imagine that this country never at any time participated in the guilt of slavery. The twenty millions of pounds paid in compensa- tion for the emancipation of our slaves, were a noble and generous sacrifice made to the cause of right and of humanity, but it is wrong to quote them as a sacrifice made to our colonists. They had acquired and held their pro- perty by, under, and through the law, and the law could not be altered without giving them compensation. It has been proved, with facts and figures, that this compensation was not adequate. The country, it has been said, was not only just to the enslaved Africans, but also generous to itself; it had right on its side and also might, and it drove a hard bargain with the slave-owners. On the other hand, it has been asserted, with great acerbity, that the country paid too much, and that the cruel and cunning colonist extorted by far too high a compensation from its overwrought sense of justice. And certainly those who followed the lead of Lord Brougham's opinion, and who with the wet sponge of a cheap and tearful enthusiasm, wiped out of the statute-book all records of the law between master and man, must have considered the smallest compensation in the light of a weak concession to an imaginary and wicked claim. These dissensions, these an- tagonistic interests, produced much bitterness of feeling and from that period dates the habit of denouncing our white fellow subjects in the West Indies as an iniquitous race, as hard and greedy men, as oppressors of their kind, as utterly unsympathetic with the noble devotion of Great Britain, which taxed itself to an enormous extent to abolish slavery in the West In- dies. Strange inconsistency l Thirty millions of Englishmen have for years past been zealous in self-laudation because they paid about thirteen shillings a head to promote the discontinuance of a state of things, which by very slow degrees they had come to acknowledge as wicked and die- graceful to Christianity and civilization ; but they held it, and many still hold it moat abominable that their fellow-subjects in the West Indies de- murred to divesting themselves of this iniquitous property and that, since the guilt was common to all, they demanded that all should bear their share of the cost of doing away with it.
Unfortunately, the question of slavery and its equitable abolition was followed by the controversy on Protection and Free Trade. While the Slavery quarrel lasted, public opinion was indoctrinated with the idea, that to consume slave-grown sugar is an indirect, but not the less a certain means of encouraging slavery ; that the men who deal in, or consume the fruits of slave-labour, are to the full as guilty as the slaves' taskmaster- that the receiver is as bad as the thief. This idea was sublimated into a principle when the final bargain for the liberation of our slaves was made. In addition to the compensation for the loss of the gratuitous services of the Creoles, the nation expressed its desire to discourage slavery by giving the free-labour produce of the West Indies a decided advantage over similar produce from slave-holding countries. The duties on the former were light, those on the latter were heavy. If the foreign alaveholder pocketed two profits—his own and that of his bondsman—the employers of free labour in our own colonies had the advantage of paying a lower duty in bringing their produce to English markets. This arrangement, intended to benefit our own colonies, was also meant in a distinct and emphatic manner to de-
monstrate our aversion ,to slavery and its upholders. I will not meddle with the merits of the qatdon on the grounds of political economy • enough, that the arrangement was agreeable to the dictates of an enlightened phi- lanthropy, and that it was perfectly consistent with, nay I that it was a ne- cessary consequence of, the abolition of slavery in our own colonies. But our anti-slavery enthusiasm paled before our love for orthodoxy, in questions of finance. We were told to buy in the cheapest market, no matter from whom. The idea of a complicity between the thief and the receiver was indignantly scouted, and our fellow-subjects, in the West Indies were again among the conquered. Their protests against a measure which left them unprotected to compete with the slaveholding States, passed unheeded, or elicited at best some savage jeers at the impotent malignity of men, who, unable any longer to victimize the Creole, sought to victimize the British consumer ; and who, after wildly squandering the twenty millions they had extorted from British generosity, sought, again and again, to obtain fresh bounties, fresh incentives to reckless extravagance. The Anti-Slavery So- ciety, whose duty it was to see justice done to the West Indies, and whose still more solemn duty it was, to use all legal means in opposition to slavery abroad, limited its action to an empty protest. It had fought and con- quered public opinion on the question of slavery in our own possessions, and in the heyday of its strength and influence it professed its inability to pro- tect the emancipated colonies, and it lamented, in terms of gentle sorrow, over the defection of some of its most influential supporters. There was ample cause for such a lament, for among the most uncompromising sup- porters of the measure which equalized the duties on free and on slave- grown sugar, (the article in which our colonies mainly compete with Spain and America,) there were numbers of the most eminent philanthropists affiliated to a society which professed to aim at the abolition of slavery throughout the world. The leaders of that party, arrayed on the side of Free Trade, contended for, and carried the measure which at this moment causes Great Britain to employ in the production of sugar alone to the full as many slaves as she ever employed in the worst days of West Indian slavery ; and the first cargo of slave-grown sugar which entered the port of Bristol under the new regulations, belonged to a distinguished member of the Society of Friends, who at that time happened to preside over the labours of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery. Thus sayeth common Rumour. I repeat what has frequently been stated and what has never been contradicted, and I repeat it thus publicly, subject to and anxious for
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