A step, singularly hesitating and guarded as it is, has
been made by France towards the abolition of slavery in her colonies. With characteristic philosophy, our neighbours did not set about the work in the same blind working-journeyman fashion that England adopted, just doing the job and no more: the French have insti- tuted an extensive inquiry into the subject, our own great experi- ment forming one subject of investigation ; the Commission have made a voluminous report, and have framed measures of a very complicated kind. They appear to avoid some of the most glaring faults which we committed ; though others, scarcely less preg- nant with evil, are imitated with exaggeration. The state of ap- prenticeship was a bad contrivance, because it subjected creatures in an infantile state of mind to all the incertitude of a temporary mode of existence, which yet was so long that for them to fulfil its conditions was more than could have been expected: apprentice- ship tantalized with the promise of freedom, while it kept up the vexations and restraints of slavery, and did not teach that self- reliance and spontaneous industry which were the qualities most wanted in the emancipated slaves ; it did little good, and was sure to provoke bad feelings. The French Commissioners have copied that provision on a larger scale. Complete abolition of slavery is to be deferred for fifteen years at least : during the first ten years, the slaves are to enjoy certain civil rights, and especially that of personal property and the privilege of purchasing free- dom; but they can only assert those rights in the law courts by means of a patron or " curator ": in the next five years is to 7 be instituted a kind of villeinage, like our apprenticeship ; and a multitude of specialties encumber the new and temporary law. Whether such a factitious and arbitrary social change can be worked in practice, is much to be doubted. The object is, to pre- vent that general withdrawal of Negroes from the labour-market which brought the British West Indies to the verge of ruin. Eng- land has not prevented that withdrawal ; but she proposes to supply the deficiency by throwing in more labour, in the shape of free African emigration—a much simpler method, and one already partially at work with more than proportionate success. But France has begun to learn, and no nation is a better pupil in ab- stract principles.
