Thoughts on Slavery and Cheap Sugar / A Letter to the Members and Friends of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society
Date: 2016-08-16T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Slavery; Slave trade; Sugar trade

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Title: Thoughts on Slavery and Cheap Sugar

Author: J. Ewing Ritchie

Release date: August 16, 2016 [eBook #52820]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52820

Credits: Transcribed from [1844?] Aylott and Jones edition by David Price

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOUGHTS ON SLAVERY AND CHEAP SUGAR ***

Transcribed from [1844?] Aylott and Jones edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

THOUGHTS
ON
SLAVERY AND CHEAP SUGAR,

A Letter

TO THE MEMBERS AND FRIENDS
OF THE
BRITISH AND FOREIGN ANTI-SLAVERY
SOCIETY.

By JAMES EWING RITCHIE.

LONDON:
AYLOTT AND JONES, 8, PATERNOSTER ROW.

Price Eightpence.

In some papers this Pamphlet was advertised as published at Sixpence; it has been found, however, desirable to alter the price.  To those who may discover coincidences of matter and manner between these pages and those of the Philanthropist, the Author has only to add, that having gone over much of the same ground in that Journal, he thought himself justified in introducing such facts as might be available here.

London: Blackburn and Pardon, Printers, 6, Hatton Garden.

To the Members and Friends of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.

Gentlemen,

At the Annual Meeting of your Society, that has just been held, one of the most crowded you have ever convened, the able and eloquent advocate of free trade, George Thompson, succeeded in carrying an amendment, notwithstanding the avowed opposition of your officers and Committee; an amendment of the most essential importance, pledging you to the consideration of a subject that threatens to impair the usefulness, and to imperil the very existence of the Society you support.  As a sincere well-wisher to that Society, as one eager with yourselves for the abolition of slavery throughout the world, the writer of the following pages beseeches you to peruse them in the spirit of anxious solicitude with which they were penned.

You must be aware, by the course you are pursuing, you are losing the sympathies of the popular mind.  If you heed not what you are about, the results of last Friday’s vote will materially impair your strength.  You are already quoted by men who have no interests in common with the people; you are an authority in the mouths of Conservative statesmen: the advocates of monopoly, and bloodshed, and death, for the former implies the latter, tell us you sanction their proceedings, and smile complacently on their resort to measures that can only derive efficacy from the fact, that they are backed by the soldier’s sword.  Religious and peaceable men, as you are, with full faith, believing what reason and revelation alike teach, that truth—mere truth—simple and alone, is stronger than the iron arm of might, succumbs to no power, in heaven above, or on the earth beneath, how can you, how dare you, give the lie to the principles you profess, and ask the aid of government, which is based alone upon physical force?  Think you, by the bayonet and ball, to ennoble your noble cause?  Know you so little of earth’s history, as for one moment to suppose that wrong ever became right, or that by the employment of means which error has used with success, you can obtain even the shadow of a gain for the sacred cause of truth?

Sir Robert Peel, the forlorn hope of rulers who have come into the world a century too late, and who obstinately continue to oppose the advancing stream, by which they will assuredly be swept away, has done you the questionable honour of alluding to you, as on his side, in opposition to the people’s friends.  How he abhors slavery, he has shown in the reduction he has announced in the duties on coffee, which employs three-fourths of the slaves in Brazil.  Will this be no stimulus to slavery there?  Or is the slave only the subject of your deep concern, when he is employed in the cultivation of sugar?  The editors of the “Anti-Slavery Reporter” complain of being misrepresented, and blame Mr. Cobden for blaming them, as if they approved of the government scheme.  But unfortunately you and the government have entered into partnership—Sir Robert Peel helps you, and you help him.  It is the firm we find fault with.  One member may not exactly approve of every thing his partner does, but he must bear it as best he can.  We learn “from the ordinary channels of information,” as “they say in another place,” that Mr. Barber is very indignant at the idea of being made a sharer in the guilt of Mr. Fletcher, and his amiable accomplice, in the forgery of wills.  We doubt not but that your Committee can quite sympathise in Mr. Barber’s righteous indignation.  If they wished to avoid the charge of hypocrisy, which may be fairly brought against the West Indian monopoly party in the House of Commons, they should have acted as Mr. Barber must wish he had acted—they should have refused to be made the tools of any man, or set of men.

This has not been done.  The odium that attaches to the government is yours.  The slave-holder would, ere now, have been driven from the market—he would have stood before the world blasted in character and worth, had you never descended from the high ground on which it is given the advocate of truth to stand—had you never pandered to political factions—had you never given to party “what was meant for mankind.”  The Tory press have come to your aid; and if you have the least regard for the great cause of which you are the pledged supporters, you will scorn the envenomed slanderers who supply what they need in reasoning, by the most vulgar and disgusting abuse. [6]  It would be well, too, if some of your own Committee who are connected with the public press, would pause ere they impute incompetency to consider the question to those who gave the verdict last Friday, at Exeter Hall.  That they were beaten is no argument whatever why they should insult those who differed in opinion from themselves.  The Editor of the Patriot thought otherwise, else why were we told the question was too abstruse for us to settle?  Are we to wait till his powerful intellect has made it clear?  Does he not know that while the Committee were continuing in the old routine, the public mind had arrived at an opposite decision?  Men have learned at last that slavery can only be destroyed by freedom; that given, the right to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest—and the employer of free men will soon be left alone in the field.

With these few remarks, gentlemen, the writer would commend the Thoughts on Slavery and Cheap Sugar to your most attentive perusal.  The subject is of no common importance.  If you are wrong, you are altogether wrong, and are a curse instead of a blessing—a curse to the slaves abroad—a curse to the negro on the coast of Africa, who is now murdered when he was before sold as a slave, and whom we would civilise and christianise by transporting to the untilled fields of Jamaica [7]—a curse to the labourer at home, whose wretched existence you help to render more wretched still.  Well may you shudder as you think of the responsibility you incur.  Consider well your present course—momentous interests are at stake.  Let your decision be calm and unprejudiced—not given in deference to well-meaning and respectable men—not from any uneasy sensation of annoyance or ill-will, but such as will be in accordance with the light you have.  Your cause is a popular one, and you must be in a false position when you find yourselves opposed to the popular will.  This one fact of itself ought to excite suspicion.  Advocating as you do the rights and dignity of man, you and the creatures and champions of a fictitious aristocracy can have no common ground, and can never be found on a common side.  To be amongst such men at all, you must have drifted from your moorings.  Look well to it that you rectify this error in time.

One word about the pamphlet.  It is written with no reference whatever to the government scheme.  It is hardly worth while to attack a measure which surely your Committee will not defend—a measure which will merely drive slave-grown sugar from one market to another—a measure which opens the door abundantly to fraud, and to those immoralities with which fraud is always accompanied.  The writer’s object has been to show that our past mode of procedure has not destroyed slavery;—that the adopting the principles of free-trade alone can do this; and that such a course would be a great national boon.  All he aims at is the truth; and he should be happy to stand corrected when in the wrong.

That you, gentlemen, may calmly and seriously consider the momentous question discussed in these pages, and that the valuable Society, which has so many claims on your regard, may continue to exist and act with increasing power, till slavery be abolished, is the sincere wish and prayer of

The Author.

Camden Town, May 20, 1844.

THOUGHTS, &c.

Eleven years have passed away since, at an enormous cost, slavery was abolished in the British dominions.  The day that witnessed the act is one memorable in the annals of our country.  It stands out conspicuously, and throws into the shade much over which the Christian and the patriot cannot choose but mourn.  All honour be given to the men by whom it was carried.  Let the fame and name of such benefactors of their race as Granville Sharp, Zachary Macaulay, William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, ever live fresh and fair in the remembrances of an admiring posterity.  Theirs be the praise due to all who, through good and bad report, in faith and sincerity, give battle for the right, when weaker men are cowed down by might; and glorious is it to know that the words they spoke had in them life and power—that they reached the heart of England’s millions, so that the cry for justice to the sons of Africa was borne as by the winds of heaven over the length and breadth of this thickly-peopled isle, and was heard in morning light and evening’s shade, when man went forth to his work, or when he rested from the labours of the day, till at length Great Britain washed her hands of the stain she had contracted by her sanction of the accursed traffic in flesh and blood, and proclaimed freedom and manhood to the slave.

So far so good.  Whatever imperfections may have attended it, it was a noble act—one of which we may well be proud; on the part of the many, it was done in sincerity and truth.  The enlightened people of England considered it almost as a boon to themselves.  There was joy and rejoicing at home as well as in the green islands of the west.  When the morning dawned on which the slave, the black, stepped forth unchained and free, praise and thanksgivings burst from the lips of others than the long-oppressed descendants of Ham.  It was the triumph of humanity; and man, wherever he lived, and whatever his lot, could well be glad.

Years have passed, and the people of England have not as yet reaped the benefit to which they were fairly entitled by the sacrifices they made.  There is a monopoly in favour of West India produce, which deprives the working man of this country of an essential article of food.  Slavery still remains, and, till that monopoly is abolished, will remain.  Our abolition of it was regarded as an experiment by slave-holding states—an experiment which they now consider to have entirely failed.  It is quite natural they should arrive at such a conclusion.  What we have done has been but little.  We have merely withdrawn from the slave-market our demand for slaves.  It remains for us to show, that economically as well as morally we have made a change for the better; that the labour of free men is more productive than that of slaves.  By keeping up our monopoly we practically declare the reverse.  We supply the slave-holder with his strongest arguments against abolition; and, by giving him an advantage over us in the markets of the world, we afford a stimulus to slavery itself; and thus commit what we profess to abhor.  Slave-owners are not remarkable for a high moral sense; could we show them that it was for their interest to emancipate their slaves, they would not be long ere they became our converts.  As it is, we appeal to them in vain.  To the voice of the charmer they are deaf.  Even Lord Brougham’s silvery tones and gentle pleadings fail to move and win; nor does Joseph Sturge meet with a better fate.

Slavery is a tremendous ill—an unmitigated curse; earth cannot produce its equal.  Where it rears its hideous head, all that raises man above the beast, and makes life a thing to be desired, languishes and dies.  Its state is dark as night—dreary as death—terrible as hell.  For putting it down two plans have been proposed.  It can be destroyed, it is said, by government interference, by treaties, by armed power.  This has been tried; we shall now see with what effect.  As soon as, in 1807, Parliament had passed a bill abolishing the British slave trade, by doing which we but did what was done in Denmark in 1792, the British ministers at all foreign courts were ordered to negotiate treaties for the abolition of the slave-trade.  Mr. Laird tells us—[11]

“They commenced with Portugal, after nine years’ labour, concluding a treaty in 1810.  In 1815 Great Britain paid £300,000 for seizing Portugal vessels engaged in the trade up to the 1st June, 1814; and the same year gave up to her £600,000, for another treaty putting an end to the Portuguese slave-trade,” except for the purpose of supplying the transatlantic possessions belonging to the crown of Portugal.  “In 1817, a third treaty was made, under which the Mixed Commission Courts and Preventive Squadron were established.  In 1823, another treaty was brought forth.”  In the mean while the trade carried on by miscreants of all nations, under the fraudulent cover of the Portuguese flag, became a disgrace to Christendom. [12a]  “In 1889, the British Parliament took the law into their own hands, and passed an act authorising British cruisers to seize Portuguese vessels engaged in the slave-trade, and constituting British Vice-Admiralty Courts to condemn them.  In 1842, this law was repealed, and a fifth treaty has been made with Portugal.  We are therefore about to recommence the same round again with this power; though the increase of the trade under our former treaties was from 25,000 slaves in 1807 to 56,000 in 1822; and in 1839, forty-eight vessels, under the Portuguese flag (out of a total of sixty-one slave-vessels) were condemned at Sierra Leone.”

We next come to Spain.  In 1814, we offered her a bribe of £800,000 if she would abolish the slave-trade at the end of five years.  This she refused, but promised to prohibit the trade, except for Spanish possessions.  In 1815 we got her to sign, with other powers, at the Congress of Vienna, a declaration “that the slave trade is repugnant to the principles of humanity and of universal morality.”  In 1817, another treaty was got, on our paying £400,000 for it; and in 1822, a third; and “the sea swarmed with slave-ships, carrying on the slave-trade under the flag of Spain.”  [12b]  And so it continued until 1836, when the fourth, or Clarendon treaty was made; which Sir Fowell Buxton designates “an impudent fraud,” but which Mr. Bandinell thinks perfection, or as near perfection as a treaty can get.  In it was embodied an equipment clause, by which a vessel with certain articles and fittings on board is liable to condemnation.  This has had the effect of diminishing the trade carried on under the Spanish flag, but the number of slaves landed in Cuba does not appear to have been at all affected by it; forty-three vessels entering the port of Havanna, after landing their slaves on the coast of Cuba, in 1836; the annual average number in the next four years being forty-five.

“It appears, therefore, that for our £400,000 paid in 1817 we have got four treaties, under which the supply of the Spanish colonies with slaves has gone on as regularly as that of any other article of commerce, increasing and diminishing with the demand for them; that in the mean time we have, as slave-catchers for them, handed over to their tender mercies several thousand emancipados at the Havanna, who are a degree worse off than the slaves themselves; and our consul having contrived an ingenious plan to get back some of these poor people, has had his ‘exequatur’ withdrawn, and turned out of the colony.

“On the separation of Brazil from Portugal, negotiations were entered into to induce the Brazilian government to abandon the slave trade; and, in 1826, a treaty was entered into declaring it piracy, after 1830, when a mixed British and Brazilian court were to adjudicate on seizures.  The greatest exertions were used to import slaves from the date of this treaty, and the vessels were consequently much more crowded than usual; yet, out of 150,587 slaves legally imported into Rio Janeiro between the 1st July, 1827, and 31st December, 1830, when it became a smuggling trade, the mortality on the middle passage was only eight per cent.  In 1831, the trade still going on, Don Pedro issued a decree, declaring all slaves brought into Brazil FREE.  In 1835, a new treaty was entered into with Great Britain, similar to the Spanish one of the same date, which the Brazilian legislature refused to ratify then, and repeated the refusal in 1840.”

“The result of our treaty-making with Brazil, according to the source of information, the Parliamentary Papers A and B, has been an increase in the extent of her trade, accompanied with an increase in the cruelty with which it is carried on; the mortality being raised on the middle passage from 8 per cent. in 1830, to 25 per cent. in 1840.”—(Buxton, p. 174.)  In the mean time our cruisers have captured some thousand negroes; and “every account received from Brazil of the state of the negroes, who had been nominally emancipated by sentence of the mixed commission courts, shows that in reality they have continued to be slaves.”—(Bandinell, p. 235.)

As the vessels bearing Portuguese, Spanish, and Barbarian flags, are the only ones employed in the conveyance of slaves from America within the tropics, it is hardly necessary to allude to the treaties which Government has, with a praiseworthy pertinacity, concluded with other countries that never had any slave trade at all.  For the same reason we pass by those entered into with the enlightened chiefs who rule on the coasts and rivers of Africa, and whose sanction has been purchased by scarlet coats, cocked hats, and plush unmentionables.  The conclusion of the whole matter is, that our treaties have been in vain.  We are as far from the desired end as ever.

On the 26th of December, 1839, Lord John Russell, after referring to the failure of treaties that had been concluded, stated, “That her Majesty’s confidential advisers are therefore compelled to admit the conviction that it is indispensable to enter upon some new preventive system.”—(Parl. Papers, No. 57, 8th Feb. 1840.)  In the same year Sir Fowell Buxton made a confession of a similar character.  “It is then,” he writes, “but too manifest, that the efforts already made for the suppression of the slave trade have not accomplished their benevolent object.  Millions of money and multitudes of lives have been sacrificed; and, in return for all, we have only the afflicting conviction that the slave trade is as far as ever from being suppressed.”—(Buxton, p. 203.)  “Once more, then, I must declare my conviction, that the slave trade will never be suppressed by the system hitherto pursued.”

In 1821, her Majesty’s commissioners at Sierra Leone report only one case brought before them, and that the trade was decreasing.  Ten years afterwards they report its increase.  “There would then appear at present, we regret to say, but little likelihood of the slave trade ever being suppressed by the present restrictive measures employed to prevent that traffic.”—(Parl. Paper, A., 1831.)

On the 31st of December, twenty years after the establishment of the mixed commission courts, Messrs. Macaulay and Doherty made the following statement to Lord Palmerston, in which they confessed the utter failure of the means that had been pursued.  After referring to the powers possessed by England for the purpose of putting down the inhuman trade in slaves, they observe:—

“But whatever other means may be necessary in a time of profound peace to give effect to England’s interpretation of the law of nations, those means she will not surely hesitate to adopt, when her only other alternative is, retiring at once from a contest which she has long waged, baffled, beaten, and insulted by a set of lawless and outcast smugglers, or wilfully continuing to sacrifice thousands of valuable lives, and millions of money, with the full knowledge that the only result of her further efforts will be fresh triumphs to the slave traders, and the increased misery of their victims.

“Desirable as would be the concession by America of the right of mutual search, experience has shown we can expect no permanent advantage from it.

“Disappointment has followed every effort hitherto made, and stronger measures are now imperatively called for—measures which, without violating the laws of nations, or the faith of treaties, will at length accomplish the earnest desire of the British nation by the total abolition of the African slave trade.”—(Parl. Papers, A., Further Series, 1838 & 9.)

Our treaties have thus been powerless for good; and, what is worse, they have been powerful for bad.  The horrors of the middle passage have been immeasurably increased.  The more stringent the treaties the more inhuman becomes the trade; and the only result will be aggravated sufferings to the unfortunate victims of our well-meaning philanthropy.  The greater the risks the higher the profits; and there will always be desperate men—men who have nothing to lose—who will expose themselves to any dangers to win the gold they love.  One successful voyage amply compensates for the sufferings and dangers they endure.  Instead of having large roomy vessels, we have compelled the slave dealers to use vessels the most unfit in character, and destitute of the most necessary accommodation.  In 1841, the Jesus Maria, of 85 tons size, with 278 slaves, and 19 passengers and crew, made the voyage across the Atlantic.  If the reader thinks of a Cowes pilot-boat, with 297 human beings beneath the sun of the tropics, he may form some idea of the sufferings to which the slaves must have been exposed.  By our present system we cannot destroy, though we can add, and that in no common degree, to the cruelty of the voyage.  The high profits will always attract the man of ruined hopes and character, and such there always are to seize every project—to encounter every risk.  On the east coast of Africa negroes are usually paid for in money, or coarse cottons.  The men fetch 15 dollars, the boys 12.  At Rio Janeiro their value may be estimated at 52l. for the men; 41l. 10s. for women, and 31l. for boys.  Thus on a cargo of 500, at the mean price, the profits will exceed 19,000l.

Cost price of 500 at 15 dollars, or 3l. 5s. each

£1,625

Selling price at Rio of 500, at 41l. 10s.

£20,750

Have our readers met with “Fifty Days on Board a Slaver,” by the Rev. Pascoe Grenfell Hill?  That shows the value of armed suppression.  Mr. Hill has done good service by exposing the horrors of British mercy.  Mr. Hill was chaplain on board her Majesty’s ship the Cleopatra, when she captured the Progresso last April twelvemonth, in the Mozambique channel.  When she fell in with the Progresso, the slave vessel had been laden but a few hours, and there had been no time to generate disease.  However a change soon took place, and we must borrow Mr. Hill’s words:—

“A squall approached, of which I and others who had laid down on the deck received warning by a few heavy drops of rain.  Then ensued a scene the horrors of which it is impossible to depict.  The hands having to shorten sail suddenly, uncertain as to the force of the squall, found the poor helpless creatures lying about the deck an obstruction to getting at the ropes, and doing what was required.  This caused the order to send them all below, which was immediately obeyed.  The night, however, being intensely hot and close, 400 wretched beings thus crammed into a hold, twelve yards in length, seven in breadth, and only three feet and a half in height, speedily began to make an effort to reissue to the open air.  Being thrust back, and striving the more to get out, the after hatch was forced down on them.  Over the other hatchway in the fore-part of the vessel, a wooden grating was fastened.  To this the sole inlet for the air, the suffocating heat of the hold, and, perhaps, panic from the strangeness of their situation, made them press, and thus great part of the space below was rendered useless.  They crowded to the grating, and, clinging to it for air, completely barred its entrance.  They strove to force their way through apertures in length fourteen inches, and barely six inches in breadth, and in some instances succeeded.  The cries—the heat, I may say without exaggeration, the smoke of their torment—which ascended, can be compared to nothing earthly.  One of the Spaniards gave warning that the consequences would be ‘many deaths.’  Thursday, April 13th, (Holy Thursday,) the Spaniard’s prediction of last night was this morning fearfully verified.  Fifty-four crushed and mangled corpses lifted up from the slave deck; some were brought to the gangway and thrown overboard; some were emaciated from disease; many were bruised and bloody.  Antonio tells me that some were found strangled—their hands still grasping each other’s throats—and tongues protruding from their mouths.  The bowels of one were crushed out; they had been trampled to death, for the most part, the weaker under the feet of the stronger, in the madness and torment of suffocation from crowd and heat.  It was a horrid sight as they passed one by one—the stiff distorted limbs smeared with blood and filth—to be cast into the sea; some still quivering were laid on the deck to die; salt water thrown on them to revive them, and a little fresh water poured into their mouths.”

But we hasten to the close of this scene of death.

“As soon as the Progresso anchored, we were visited by the health officer, who immediately admitted us to pratique.  My friend Mr. Shea, then superintendent of the naval hospital, also paid us a visit, and I descended with him, for the last time, to the slave hold.  Long accustomed as he has been to scenes of suffering, he was unable to endure a sight surpassing, he said, ‘all he could have conceived of human misery,’ and made a hasty retreat.  One little girl, crying bitterly, was entangled between the planks, wanting strength to extricate her wasted limbs, till assistance was given her.”

In a voyage of fifty days, there occurred one hundred and sixty-three deaths!  Can slavery be worse than this? if this melancholy tale teaches anything, it is evidently the uselessness of armed suppression.

And yet this wretched, this utterly inefficient system, is to be continued and extended.  A new remedy has been proposed by the Honourable Captain Denman, which it appears Sir Robert Peel is about to sanction.  Colonel Nicolls says, it will put the slave trade down in ten or twelve months,—this we more than doubt.  A blockade which, to be effectual, must extend over six thousand miles of coast, is not so easy a thing as it may seem on paper.  With Lord John Russell we believe, “that to suppress the slave trade by a marine guard is impossible, were the whole British navy employed in the attempt.”  A British force may burn the baracoons, but as long as the demand exists, a supply from some quarter or other will be procured.  To show that the Colonel’s logic is not absolutely perfect, we quote the following fact.  It was thought the destruction of the baracoons at Gallinas, in 1840, would have prevented their re-formation, but this does not appear to have been the case.  The commissioners observe, “We have received information that, during the last rains, no less than three slave factories were settled in the Gallinas, whither the factors and goods had been conveyed by an American vessel.”—(Slave Trade Papers, 1843.)  Destroy the nests, and the birds will not breed, says Colonel Nicolls.  The gallant colonel forgets that the demand for slaves, and not the existence of baracoons, creates the slave trade; to borrow an illustration from Adam Smith, a man is not rich because he keeps a coach and four horses; but he keeps a coach and four horses because he is rich.  Men make but an indifferent hand at reasoning when they are unable to tell which is the cause, and which the effect.

Had this system been attended by any the smallest amount of good, we should have kept out of account altogether the last item in this part of our subject, to which we shall refer the reader—that of expense; but when we find the money thus squandered has produced no earthly good whatever, when all parties confess that past measures have ended in utter failure, and that the slave trade, so far from being put down in all its forms of abomination and cruelty, is more vigorous than before; it is but right that we should exclaim against the waste of money that has been so lavishly incurred.  Sir Fowell Buxton estimates the expense, on the part of Great Britain, in carrying out the slave trade preventive system up to 1839, at £15,000,000.  We here quote from Mr. Laird:

“Her Majesty’s late commissioner of inquiry on the coast of Africa, estimates the expense incurred there, independently of the salaries and contingencies at home, of officers connected with the Anti-Slavery Treaty Department, at £229,090 per annum; and by the finance accounts, I find, that for the year ending 5th January, 1842, £57,024 was paid out of the consolidated fund, to the officers and crews of her Majesty’s ships, for bounty on slaves, and tonnage on slave vessels.  These gallant men, however, do not think they get what they ought to do; for there is a long correspondence about what they lose by the way the prizes are measured for tonnage-money; but it must be consolatory to them to know that they have, in one year, received £1,000 more prize money than their predecessors did in nine; the amount of prize money paid for capturing slaves, from 1814 to 1822, being only £56,017.  In fact the African station has been improving in value, as a naval command, since the slave trade treaties; it is now the bonne bouche of the Admiralty, and as such was given to the last first lord’s brothers.  The mixed commission courts cost the country about £15,000 per annum; and as any dispute between the Portuguese, Spanish, or Brazilian judges is settled by an appeal to the dice box, the monotony of their lives is agreeably diversified; having retiring salaries, the patronage is valuable.  The whole annual cost may be taken at £300,000.” [20]

So much for this part of our subject.  We may fairly conclude, that such a system is evidently vicious in principle: it has certainly failed to answer the end proposed, and the sooner it is given up the better.  But let it not be for one moment understood that we consider slavery always will remain the curse and shame of humanity.  We believe that it can be extinguished,—that it must be extinguished,—that, sooner or later, God’s sun shall shine every where upon the free, and that slavery shall remain alone in the dark records of earth’s misery and crime.

Freedom is the antagonist of slavery.  Free labour must drive out of the market the labour of the slave.  We were told before emancipation, that the former was cheaper than the latter: we have yet to learn that it is not.  A glance at the present condition of the sugar-producing countries will convince any one that the West India planter has immense advantages over his rival of Cuba or Brazil.

There is a great amount of misunderstanding on this subject.  The soil of the West India Islands is always represented as exhausted, which is far from being actually the case.  In Cuba, according to an estimate made by the patriotic society of Havanna, it appears that two hundred and fifteen acres of new land are expected to produce, in cane cultivation, thirteen hundred boxes of sugar, or 2172 lbs. per acre.  We may reasonably infer, that the production in Brazil does not equal this.  We find that the exports of sugar from the latter country have rather declined, while those of Cuba have been nearly doubled within the last few years; while from the evidence taken by a committee of the House of Commons, it appears that with the present imperfect system of cultivation, the following results have been obtained, including ratroons, or canes cut for several years successively. [21]

Jamaica,

about

2000 per acre.

St. Vincent,

„

3000 „

Antigua,

„

3000 „

Barbadoes,

„

3000 „

A pretty fair result, it must be confessed, considering the exhausted condition of the soil.  Another advantage the West India Islands possess over Brazil, arises from their facilities for water carriage.  Their limited extent is anything but a drawback,—it makes them all sea coast.  With labour and capital, they would be put in a position that would enable them to under-sell slave-grown sugar.  The great disadvantage under which they suffer, is scarcity of labour.  Antigua alone has, in this respect, a sufficient supply, and let us hear the result.  The first witness we shall call is Captain Larlyle, governor of French Guiana.  The captain was sent by the French government to visit most of the British West India Islands, and to see the working of the present system; the report he made has been published by government, in a work, entitled, “Abolition de l’Esclavage dans les Colonies Anglaises.”  Evidently his prejudices are for the continuance of slavery, but with respect to Antigua, he was forced to bear witness of a contrary character.  He observes, (our quotations are from the Anti-Slavery Reporter, of May 1st, 1844,) that “it has maintained, during the last seven years, a state of prosperity, which every impartial person cannot fail to acknowledge.” p. 189.  “The exports have rather increased than diminished since emancipation.” pp. 194, 5.  “If, under the system of slavery, labour had been as complete and productive as it ought to have been, if the negroes had employed the time to their best advantage, there is no doubt but they would have produced more than at present, when, in consequence of freedom, the fields have lost a third of their labourers.  But I have had occasion to say, in my former reports, that forced labour has never answered the expectations that have been formed respecting it; and I find a new proof of this in the table of production in Antigua during fifteen years.” p. 196.  Again, Captain Larlyle says, “If the colonists are to be believed, the plantations are worth, without the negroes, as much as they were worth formerly with their gangs of slaves.”  Equally favourable is the evidence of a lady who resided in Antigua, both before and after the emancipation of the slaves, and who possessed the most ample opportunities for acquiring a knowledge of the working of either system.  After referring to the depressed state of the island before the abolition of slavery, she observes:

“But this oppression did not long continue; for no sooner was the deed done, and the chain which bound the negro to his fellow-man irrecoverably snapped asunder, than it was found, even by the most sceptical, that free labour was decidedly more advantageous to the planter than the old system of slavery; that, in fact, an estate could be worked for less by free labour than it could when so many slaves, including old and young, weak and strong, were obliged to be maintained by the proprietors.  Indeed, the truth of this assertion was discovered even before the negroes were free; for no sooner did the planters feel that no effort of theirs could prevent emancipation from taking place, than they commenced to calculate seriously the probable result of the change, and to their surprise found, upon mature deliberation, that their expenses would be diminished, and their comforts increased, by the abolition of slavery.”

Again, we are told, although there are some few persons who deny that free labour is less expensive than slavery, yet the general voice pronounces it a system beneficial to the country.

It has been proved to demonstration that estates which, under the old system, were clogged with debts they never could have paid off, have, since emancipation, not only cleared themselves, but put a handsome income into the pockets of their proprietors.  Land was also increased greatly in value.  Sugar plantations that would scarcely find a purchaser before emancipation, will now command from £10,000 sterling; [23] while many estates that were abandoned in days of slavery, are now once more in a state of cultivation, and the sugar-cane flourishes in verdant beauty where nothing was to be seen but rank and tangled weeds, or scanty herbage.

To put down slavery, then, we have only to let free labour have fair play.  It is not the continuance of monopoly, but emigration, that is wanted.  The first consequence of emancipation was the formation of a middle class where it had not before existed, which middle class was entirely subtracted from the agricultural population.  718,525 human beings were emancipated in our sugar colonies, including the Mauritius, of whom one-fourth were immediately absorbed in the formation of a middle class.  Hence the deficiency in labour which at present affects the West India Islands.  We believe, with Mr. Laird, [24] “that it is the quantity, not the quality, of labour that is wanting.”  Indeed it has been shown that a free negro in Guiana creates double the amount of sugar that his enslaved countryman in Cuba does.

In many parts of the East labourers may be hired at three-halfpence and two-pence a day.  From the evidence given before the West African Committee, we learn, that wages average from two-pence to four-pence a day in our three settlements on the coast of Africa.  The cost of the slave in Cuba or Brazil equals this.  Let the experiment be fairly tried, and it will soon be evident that slave labour must be driven out of the market.  That becomes still plainer when we look at the actual condition of the slave-grown sugar.  From Cuba every fresh post brings a continuance of bad news.  There is a want of capital and skill—a blight rests upon the land—property and life are insecure.  On March 6th, a statement appeared in the Anti-Slavery Reporter, giving an account of the wretched condition of the slaves.  “We are credibly informed,” observes the editor, “that on some of the sugar plantations in Cuba the slaves are in a most miserable condition—not less than the half of a gang being sickly, covered with sores, and even cripples—the whip supplying virtue and strength, health and numbers.  Unable to ‘trot’ to the field, they are placed on carts and carried to it, there to creep and toil by the help of the lash.  No description can exhibit the neglect, cruelty, and inhumanity, with which they are treated.  In crop-time they have no holiday—no Sunday—and no sleep!”  The Times gave the following, as from Havanna, under date of February 17:—“A slaver, with 1200 negroes, has arrived on our coast.  They have been offered at 340 dollars a-head, and our planters has determined to buy no more, and none of this cargo has been disposed of.  No one is now inclined to encourage this abominable traffic, which begins to be considered as highly injurious to the welfare of the island.  Several corporations and planters have given in reports favourable to the total abolition of the slave trade; it is understood these will be sent forthwith to the Spanish Government.”

The negroes have imbibed ideas of freedom which at no distant time will produce, by fair means or foul, a change in their condition.  The planter already begins to perceive, that it is far better to be the employer of faithful and contented labourers, than the lord of men who feel their wrongs, and who wait but the first moment of revenge.  Capital, the life-blood of industry, will never flow into a country till the capitalist has a pledge—a pledge no land of slaves can ever give—that the life he hazards, and the money he invests, are alike secure.  Were the duty on sugar so reduced to-morrow as to put it in the power of the working man to consume as much as he required, an impulse would be given to the production of sugar which would create a demand for capital—which capital would alone be safely invested where labour is free.  With a plentiful supply of labourers, no one can deny that Jamaica would be a far more eligible country for the capitalist than Cuba or Brazil; and hence the slave-trade dealers would be thrown for ever out of the markets of the world.

To put down slavery, then, we must under-sell the slave dealer.  Emigration from the coast of Africa to the West Indies must be encouraged.  At present wages in these islands are unnaturally high.  They cannot, however, long remain so.  We are glad to learn that the negroes are well off; but it cannot be expected that the West India monopoly should be continued merely that the emancipated slave may drink at his ease his Madeira or Champagne.  It will be well for him if he prepares himself for the change that must shortly come.  It is not to be expected that the proprietor who cultivates his estate at a loss, should continue to employ his capital without return.  Unless there is a change, that capital must be withdrawn; and, thrown upon his own resources, the negro labourer will sink into a state of degradation hopeless and complete. [26a]  Should it be found that the emigration scheme will not work well, it by no means follows that our only alternative is to continue the monopoly.  A late writer, [26b] on the state of Jamaica, expresses it as his opinion that the resources of the island are not above half developed; he declares that the implements used in the cultivation of the cane are in the most primitive state imaginable; and that were but the improvements in machines introduced there, which have obtained elsewhere, there would be no need whatever for additional labourers.

This may be true of Jamaica, but it will not apply equally to other parts of the West Indies, where labourers are needed; and Africa is the quarter to which we must naturally turn for a supply.  We find men in a state of practical slavery—sunk in the lowest scale of being; and we maintain the way to humanise them, to give them habits of industry and ideas of trade, is to bring them into contact with the advanced civilisation of the west.  Thanks to the labours of the missionaries, they will find their emancipated fellow-countrymen intelligent, moral, and religious men.  They will become subject to the same ameliorating influences—old things will be put away, principles of good will be formed—the savage will be lost in the advancing dignity of the man.

Let the West Indian proprietor, then, take the degraded savage and convert him into a useful member of society, and in the same manner let the free-trader go and convert the slave-owner into an honest man.  In both cases a restrictive policy has been found to be fraught with inevitable ill.  It were time that they both should retire.  Our aim should be to create in slave states a public opinion against the vile system that stains the land, and not to excite feelings of enmity against ourselves because we exclude them from our market, and seek to brand them as outcasts from society.  Not by such pharisaical modes of procedure shall we obtain our end.  If we would do a man good, we must teach him to look upon us as friends, and not foes.  We have no right to shut up a man in his guilt; and, as a nation is but an aggregate of individuals, the principles of action that obtain in the one case must be equally valid with respect to the other.  We heap contumely and scorn on the heads of the American slaveholders, and refuse to do business with the merchants of Brazil, and by such conduct directly deprive ourselves of what influence for good we might otherwise have it in our power to wield.  It is time that we turn over a new leaf; that we act more in accordance with Him who makes his sun to shine, and his rain to descend, upon the good and the bad; that we speak in friendship to our fellow-man, however degraded he may be, and win him over to the adoption of that which is just and true.  Experience, the great teacher of mankind, has shown in a thousand instances that in our efforts to put down slavery by restrictive policy and armed suppression, we have, at the most lavish expenditure of treasure and life, done nothing but create misery and ill-will.  It is the part of a wise man to abandon a plan which he sees has entirely failed.  We may, by so doing, expose ourselves to the charge of inconsistency,—the stupid sneer, the unmeaning laugh, of men to whom experience may preach in vain, may be ours; but we shall have the consolation, the sure reward, of men who, seeking that which will promote the happiness of the family of man, when they find themselves in the wrong course, immediately abandon it for the right.

In the preceding pages we have endeavoured to advocate Free Trade, as the only one thing by which slavery can be destroyed.  We now come to a subject of equal importance—the claims of our countrymen at home.  We plead not for the Manchester warehouseman, cribbed, cabined, and confined by our wretched system of commercial policy, but we plead for the overtaxed and under-fed hard-working men and women of Great Britain.  It is well to be tenderly alive to the concerns of the West Indian negro, but the charity that exhausts itself on them partakes of the same mongrel character as that sensibility which sheds floods of tears over the feigned distresses of the stage, and looks unmoved upon the miseries of a world.  A reduction in the price of sugar would most certainly be an inestimable boon to the working man.  Such a step taken by government would produce no increase in the consumption of sugar on the part of the middle or higher classes, but it would enable the poorer classes at once to use one of the most nutritious and essential articles of food.  If you would preserve a man from drunkenness, make his home happy; let him have something better than the meagre fare which too generally awaits him.  On the government which, by its interference, deprives the operative of the fair fruit of his labour, which drives him to the alehouse, to avoid the home rendered wretched by their accursed agency, rest the blame and guilt occasioned by the degradation and destruction of the body and soul of man.  Different is the judgment of Heaven from that of the world.  Could our voice reach the ears of our senators, we would ask them to pause ere they continued in a course of legislation which has been a fruitful source of vice—a course of legislation which, like the destroying angel, has spread death through the land.  We would say to them, “Law-makers, see there the wretched slave of vice; the fault is not his, but yours.  From your costly clubs, from your glittering saloons, flushed with revelry and wine, you have gone to the House, and, in the fulness of your power and pride, declared that his hearth should be desolate—that the crust he gnaws he should earn at the price of his life—that misery and want, like attendant handmaids, should follow on his steps; and if he has shrunk abashed from their presence—if his heart has failed him in the hour of need—if he has forgotten his manhood and his immortality—if he has joined in the hideous orgies of the drunken and the desolate—if he has sunk into the condition of the beast—the crime, and shame, and curse, be yours.  And you may well shudder with an unwonted fear at the thought of the hour when Heaven shall require an account at your hands—when it shall be asked you why you laid on your brother a burden greater than he could bear, and why you blotted out the image of divinity that was planted there.”

Let us just look at the history of the sugar trade,—we shall soon see how well protection has worked.  In 1824, the duty on sugar was—

West India

27s. per cwt.

East India

37s. „

Foreign

63s. „

In 1830, the West India duty was reduced to 24s., the East India to 32s., which, as the editor of the Economist has well remarked, was “just so much more put into the pockets of the producers, so long as the 63s. on foreign sugar was continued.”  In 1836, a slight change was introduced.  The duty on East India was equalised, so that the duty was—

British possessions

24s. per cwt.

Foreign

63s. „

In 1824, we imported—

West India Sugar

3,935,549

cwts.

East India and Mauritius

271,848

„

Foreign

205,750

„

4,413,147

The duty on East India being equalised, and that on foreign remaining as before, we imported in 1840—

West India Sugar

2,217,681

cwts.

East India and Mauritius

1,043,737

„

Foreign

774,427

„

4,035,845

In 1824, the revenue from sugar was

£4,641,945

1840,

4,449,035

Between 1824 and 1840, the population had increased five millions, and yet there had been an actual falling off in the consumption of sugar of no less than 377,302 cwts. and a loss of revenue of £192,910, to say nothing of the consequent loss of employment which the five millions would otherwise have enjoyed, resulting from the impulse given to manufactures and shipping, by an increase in the sugar trade.  The cost, exclusive of duty, of 3,764,710 cwts. retained for home consumption in the year, as calculated by Mr. Porter, at the Gazette average prices, was £9,156,872.  The cost of the same quantity of Brazil or Havanna sugar, of equal quality, would have been £4,141,181, so that in one year we paid £5,015,691 more than the prices which the rest of the inhabitants of Europe would have paid for an equal quantity of sugar.  In that year the total value of our exports to our sugar colonies was under £4,000,000, so that we should have “gained a million of money in that one year by following the true principle of buying in the cheapest market, even though we had made the sugar-growers a present of all the goods which they took from us.” [31]

The Brazilian ambassador has been in vain endeavouring to effect a reduction of the duty imposed on foreign sugar.  The reign of monopoly is to be continued yet a little longer.  We are to go on throwing away our money, and losing our trade.  The working man’s food is taxed out of all proportion.  We may not use the cheap sugar of Brazil, which is imported—slave-grown as it is—into England, and, here refined, is then sold to the settler in Australia, or the emancipated West Indian labourer, for fourpence a pound.  No, the unemancipated white labourer must pay a high price for his adulterated sugar; for be it remembered that 400,000 cwts. of various ingredients are annually used, and which, cheapening the price, though then it is much higher than that of the genuine article would be, were we allowed to import it for home consumption from Brazil, is consumed principally by the lower orders of society.  The necessaries of life in this country being thus heavily taxed, the cost of our manufactures is raised, and, as a consequence, the German under-sells us in the Brazil market; and, more wonderful still, the American enters our own colonies, such as the Cape of Good Hope, and under-sells us there; and thus it is that we are punished for our sins.  It must also be remembered that, in spite of our virtual exclusion of foreign produce, Java, and Cuba, and the Brazils, had grown sugar in such abundance, as that our merchants have three separate times begged permission of the government to introduce it merely for the purposes of agriculture, promising, if their request were granted, to spoil it in such a manner as that it should be totally unfit for human food.

Notwithstanding a duty of 63s. in their favour, the monopolists complain of the low price of sugar.  From the circular of Messrs. Truman and Co., we find that, whilst the highest price of British sugar (West India middling to fine) is 68s. per cwt., the highest price for foreign (Havannah white) is only 28s. per cwt.; and thus they are getting nearly 150 per cent. more than we are paying for foreign sugar.  Again, the lowest price of English sugar (Bengal brown) is 48s., whilst the lowest price of the foreign article (Java) is 16s. 6d., and thus getting nearly 200 per cent. more than foreign sugar can be got for, they have the impudence to grumble about low prices!  Pretty cool! considering the shameless system of plundering they have been carrying on.

This immense difference in the cost of the two articles is equalised by the heavy duty imposed on the one, and the light duty upon the other: that on the highest foreign produce being 238 per cent. on the value of the sugar, whilst the duty on the highest-priced colonial sugar is but 37 per cent.; and the lowest-priced colonial sugar pays but 50 per cent. duty, whilst the lowest-priced foreign sugar actually pays 400 per cent.!  Be it remembered, this goes not to the government at home, but is so much money put into the pockets of the West Indian monopolists.  It is reckoned by a writer in the League that “the sum paid for sugar at the monopolists’ shops, more than it could be bought for at the Brazil shop, is £7,000,000 per annum.”  The same writer gives the following statement of the case:—

“Sugar at the West India shop, per lb.

5¼d.

At the Brazil shop, per lb.

1¾d.

Tax, per lb.

2¾

Tax, per lb.

7

8d.

8¾d.

So that a fine of 4¾d. is imposed on every poor man who dares to buy a pound of sugar at the Brazil shop.”

And thus an article of consumption, that has now become an essential, is raised to an extravagant price to maintain a monopoly, of which even the monopolists themselves complain.

Considered as a question of revenue, it is extremely desirable that our differential duties on sugar should be abolished.  The increased price we pay goes not to government, but into the monopolist’s pocket; he alone is benefited by it; the consumer pays 20s. a cwt. more than he otherwise would do to the grower of the favoured produce.  Equalise the duties, and, as was exemplified in the reductions that took place in the duties on coffee, by making a decrease of price to the consumer, we get an increase of revenue.  It may not be amiss to state that Mr. M‘Gregor Laird declared, in a late speech before the anniversary meeting of the Glasgow Emancipation Society, that, if the people of England consumed sugar at the same rate per head as the population of New South Wales, the annual consumption would be 900,000 tons.  The Editor of the Economist has so fully proved this part of the subject, that we cannot do better than give his own words.  We quote from an article headed “Free Trade and the National Debt,” that appeared in that paper on the 7th October last:—

“Our consumption of sugar last year was 3,876,465 cwts., at a cost of 65s. per cwt. (wholesale price), and, consequently, at that rate, the country paid for sugar £12,598,511.  Now, there is every reason to believe that, if sugar were cheaper, the same sum would still be expended upon it, and a correspondingly increased quantity consumed.  In this opinion we are supported by the very extraordinary fact that the annual consumption of sugar, which, in 1811, averaged 23¼ lbs. per head on the whole population of Great Britain and Ireland, was reduced, in 1842, in consequence of the restriction of quantity, to the rate of 15⅞lbs. per head, while the paupers in our workhouses are allowed at the rate of 23¾lbs., and the seamen in her Majesty’s service 34 lbs. per head.

“Well, then, assume that the duty on foreign sugar were reduced to 24s., the same as we now pay on colonial sugar, the price of sugar would be lowered thereby to 45s. per cwt. instead of 65s.; then the sum of £12,598,511, which we last year expended on sugar, would command 5,599,338 cwts., in place of 3,876,465 cwts., being an additional consumption, at precisely the same entire cost.  Now, at present, all the revenue which is derived from sugar is from the duty of that on 24s. on that of colonial grown (the high differential duty excluding all other), and on the quantity consumed last year yielded the sum of £4,651,758.  By the proposed equalisation of duties this sum would remain untouched, but an additional quantity (which at present gives no revenue at all) of 1,722,873 cwts. would, at the rate of 24s. per cwt., raise the revenue to £6,719,205.

“The result, therefore, would be, that for the same sum of money which the country expended last year in sugar, an additional quantity of 1,722,873 cwts. would be enjoyed by the community, which would only restore the average consumption of 23¼ lbs. per head of 1811, an additional revenue of £2,067,447 would be given to the State, and an increase of trade amounting to nearly £4,000,000 annually would be experienced by the dealers, merchants, and carriers of sugar.”

Now, with us all this seems very reasonable, and we are not a little surprised to find, as we certainly do, many intelligent and philanthropic men joining in the outcry against slave-grown sugar which the West India planters, those paragons of excellence and humanity, have had wit enough to raise, and which has answered their purposes remarkably well.  We are told it is slave-grown.  What of that?  Half the Brazil slave-grown sugar is bought by British money, and refined by British skill, and then sold by British merchants all over the globe.  Our cotton is slave-grown—tobacco, which yields a revenue of three million pounds and a half, is slave-grown.  From the southern states of America and Mexico we import slave-grown rice, indigo, and cochineal; of the manufactures we export, half are of cotton, imported from the slave states, and upon their produce the millions of our manufacturing population depend for their subsistence.  It would require no little impudence for any of the English monopolists to tell the Brazilians that we were so squeamish that we could not deal with them, because their sugar was slave-grown, when every one knows that our merchants gladly trade in and allow every one to have it cheap and good except our own hungry, wretched, and perishing poor. [35]  They are to be taxed and fleeced to keep up the West India monopoly—their bone and blood are to be preyed on by the harpies that lust for human gore.  That their desires may be gratified—that the value of their estates may be unnaturally kept up—that their vested rights, the rights of the robber and the pickpocket, if such a term can be applied to them, may be preserved—the English labourer, from a state of honest independence, is degraded into pauperism, dies in the parish workhouse, and rots in the parish vault.  Shame on this Christian land, with its stately churches, its noble mansions, with its swarms of well-paid luxurious priests, with its peers of unrivalled wealth and power, with its sons boasting their royal blood—shame on such men, that for one hour they suffer so wretched a system to continue!  It is well that they should talk of their love to religion and law, but the religion and law that connive at crying abuses and monstrous wrongs, can neither please Heaven nor bless man: they evidently are unworthy of the name they claim for themselves.

To those who are really in earnest in the cry against slave-grown produce, we say, that it is abundantly proved that the West Indian monopoly tends directly to keep up slavery.  If that were abolished, we might expect to see slavery destroyed.  The monopoly enables the West Indian planter to pay an unreasonably high price for labour, in consequence of which there is an importation of labour into the market—an unnatural demand is created.  The high price the West Indian planter gets for his sugar, makes it answer his purpose to pay more for hire than his rivals can, and the consequence is, that the neighbouring European colonists are afraid to emancipate their slaves, knowing well, that directly they would leave them for the monopoly market, and they would be left without a hand to till the soil.  For instance, we give the following case:—A large slave-owner, in Dutch Guiana, thus addressed the editor of the Economist, when that gentleman was at Amsterdam.  “We should be glad,” said he, “to follow your example, and emancipate our slaves, if it were possible; but as long as your differential duties are maintained it will be impossible.  Here is an account-sale of sugar produced in our colony, netting a return of £11 per hogshead to the planter in Surinam; and here is an account-sale of similar sugar sold in London, netting a return of £33 to the planter in Demerara; the difference ascribable only to your differential duty.  The fields of these two classes of planters are separated only by a few ditches.  Now, such is the effort made by the planter in Demerara to extend his cultivation, to secure the high price of £33, that he is importing free labourers from the hills of Hindostan, and from the coast of Africa, at great cost; and is willing to pay higher prices than even labour will command in Europe.  Let us then emancipate our slaves, which, if it had any effect, would confer the privilege of the choice of employer, and Dutch Guiana would be depopulated in a day—an easy means of increasing the supply of labour to the planters of Demerara, at the cost of entire annihilation of the cultivation of the estates in Surinam.  But abandon your differential duties; give us the same price for our produce, and thus enable us to pay the same rate of wages, and I, for one, will not object to liberate my slaves to-morrow.” [38]

We would not damp the sympathy which is felt for the enslaved producer of sugar in Brazil; but we would claim some portion of that sympathy on behalf of the toil-worn consumer at home.  The Lancashire operatives, starving in our midst, have ties on us which we must not and cannot overlook.  Let their case be considered—let their prayers be heard.  Let justice be done to them.  They are our brethren, and their case is ours.  Let us seek for them the abolition of all monopoly—for one does but involve another—they are all the results of the same impure system—they all stand and fall together.  In every country under heaven the friends of the people are ranged on the one side, and their foes and the friends of monopoly on the other.  If a monopoly of legislation had never existed at home, a monopoly of trade would never have existed in favour of any colony or nation under the sun.  Let the legislative monopoly continue, and we shall not only peril our trade abroad, but our very existence at home, and England’s glory shall vanish as a dream.  All that has been written by historians, and said by orators, and sung by poets, of a nation’s gradual decline and ignominious extinction, shall we realise in her hapless fate.

The Mayor of Liverpool, at a public meeting there, was heard to say, that our legislators were gentlemen.  Whether this was said ironically, or otherwise, we know not.  The assertion certainly contains a great deal of truth.  We cannot look at one single act of theirs without finding it full of blunders and bulls.  By their own folly we lost half our American market.  Brazil, the fourth foreign market we have, we are about to lose.  Our artizans are overworked to raise annually four or five million pounds’ worth of goods, which are then taken, and, as it were, drowned in the bottom of the sea.  What a man might have for once buying, the legislature, in its wisdom, makes him pay for twice.  It decrees that a man must toil all day for that which he might otherwise have for half a day’s work.  What admirable policy!  Blessed are its effects, in the misery it has shed over the homes of our operatives—in the life-blood it has wrung from the labourer’s heart!  It is time that whatever of manhood there is left in this Saxon and once happy land—whatever of stern valour that once distinguished us from the nations of the earth, and which the struggle for the pittance that barely keeps up life has not frittered away, or which the Union House has not starved out—should arouse and join in that cry which demands that man’s rights should be given back to him—that his serfdom be abolished—that his brotherhood be owned—that England should no longer be one vast poor-house—that life should no longer be a source of sorrow, but of joy—no longer what priestism and class legislation have made it, a thing to be feared and shunned, but a boon to be desired—that that should be a blessing, which in times past, was a bitter curse.

London: Blackburn and Pardon, Printers, 6, Hatton Garden.

FOOTNOTES.

[6]  Vide the attack on George Thompson and John Bright, in the Standard of Saturday, May 18.

[7]  Vide Report of Select Committee on West Coast of Africa.  Part I.

[11]  Vide Colonial Gazette, Nov. 1842.

[12a]  Bandinell, p. 222.

[12b]  Ibid. p. 161.

[20]  Philanthropist, No. XI. page 163.

[21]  Vide the Supplement to the Spectator newspaper, April 15th, 1843.

[23]  Vide “Antigua and the Antiguans.”

[24]  Vide “The Effect of an Alteration in the Duties on the Condition of the People of England and the Negro Slave, considered.  By Macgregor Laird, Esq.”

[26a]  This is no mere supposition.  At a public meeting held since this pamphlet was written, consisting of West India Proprietors, the Earl of Harewood stated that he had latterly been losing twelve hundred a-year by his estate in Jamaica, and that in consequence, he had ordered it to lie fallow.

[26b]  Vide Jamaica, by the Rev. Mr. Philippo.

[31]  Porter’s Progress of the Nation, vol. iii.

[35]  The following report of a speech by Mr. Cobden, in Covent-garden Theatre, is taken from the League of October 14th.  The honourable gentleman said:—“What, then, is the pretence set up?  Why, that we must not buy slave-grown sugar.  I believe that the ambassador from the Brazils is here at present, and I think I can imagine an interview between him and the President of the Board of Trade.  His excellency is admitted to an interview with all the courtesy due to his rank.  He delivers his credentials; he has come to arrange a treaty on commerce.  I think I see the President of the Board of Trade calling up a solemn, earnest, pious expression, and saying, You are from the Brazils, we shall be happy to trade with you, but we cannot conscientiously receive slave-grown produce.  His excellency is a good man of business (most men are, who come to us from abroad to settle commercial matters.)  So he says, ‘Well, then, we will see if we can trade together in some other way.  What have you to sell us?’  ‘Why,’ returns the President of the Board of Trade, ‘cotton goods; in these articles we are the largest exporters in the world.’  ‘Indeed!’ exclaims his excellency.  ‘Cotton did you say? where is cotton brought from?’  ‘Why,’ replies the minister, ‘hem—chiefly from the United States;’ and at once the question will be, ‘Pray, is it free-grown cotton, or slave-grown cotton?’  Now I leave you to imagine the answer, and I also leave you to picture the countenance of the President of the Board of Trade.  Ay, these very men, and their connexions, who are loudest in their appeals against slave-grown sugar, have landing warehouses in Liverpool and London, and send their sugar to Russia, to China, to Turkey, to Poland, to Egypt; in short, to any country under the sun.”

[38]  Economist, Sept. 16, 1843.

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Table of Contents

- THOUGHTS ON SLAVERY AND CHEAP SUGAR,

- To the Members and Friends of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.

- THOUGHTS, &c.

- FOOTNOTES.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE