treated than human beasts of burden. The hand of Providence has stamped on the oppressed a mark that cannot be effaced, and the Ethiopian must be washed white before his lot in being subject to the hostile caste can become so gentle as the case we have been supposing, of the English nation ruled by an American parliament, chosen in America, and not in England.

The exclusion from all places renders the deprivation of the elective franchise still more severe. The mulatto only feels the ruling powers, by coming in contact with his natural enemy; he only sees the constituted authorities of his country, when he looks at the hostile colour. Power is never mitigated by kindred feelings; on the contrary, it is exasperated by the instinctive sense of natural diversity, by all the factitious prejudices of customs and laws, and by all the feelings of fear which tyranny creates at once for its own augmentation, and its own punishment. But look to the worst of all these disabilities. Whatever mulatto comes into a court of justice-a court by outward form resembling what elsewhere are courts in which justice presides he comes among judges and jurors who are his natural enemies and oppressors. He is injured in his person, he is despoiled of his property, he is restrained of his liberty, by a white man; his child or his wife is taken from him; his feelings are outraged; his sense of honour-for all our cruelty has not rooted all sense of honour from the dingy bosom-his sense of honour is wounded-a sense the more exquisite that it has survived every effort of his oppressor to extinguish it. In mockery, he is bid to bend his footsteps towards the halls of justice, and tauntingly told that they fling open wide their gates to men of every complexion and every race He hurries thither: the doors are blackened with the white clouds-of his foes; the ermine decks the shoulders-of his foes; the jury-box is filled with twelve-of his foes,-selected from the motley population he lives in, for the express purpose of doing injustice between him and his adversary. But we hear it said, This is insidious-there is no such purpose in the selection." Why, then, we would ask, is the selection made? Answer us this, ye who charge us with distorting facts, or rather with perverting inferences. Answer and tell us, why the jury is to be purged of all colour, when the man of colour is tried?-freed from all community of feeling and opinion with him, and made up of men expressly and avowedly taken because they have a common colour and origin with the mulatto's antagonist? Who can name another reason for choosing them all whites, except that, if chosen indiscriminately of the two hues, there would be jurors of the same race with the man of colour; whereas the principle is, to have them all of the white man's blood and lineage? Again, let the Christian wrong-doer-for whoso consents to wrong, doeth wrong -resort to the golden rule of his Master, and put himself in the place of his tawny brother. How should we, in Old England, like being tried for our lives by a French or an American jury, sitting under the superintendence of a French or American judge? But that is a poor approximation to the case in hand. Rather let us ask, how would you-Englishmen and whites as you are-like being tried by a jury all brown mulattoes, or all black negroes, with an African in the seat of the presiding judge? How would you like being told, not only that all your judges were not to be whites like yourself, but that not one of them was to be other than aliens to your name, and complexion, and race? You have already answered the question; you have, wherever you had the power, refused to be tried by judges, any one of whom bore the marks of the hostile colour; and yet you

desire the mulatto to think he has justice, when you try him by judges, every one of whom is taken from among his enemies and oppressors! In England, you suffer not the meanest foreigner, of the most hostile nation, or the most barbarous, to be tried by a jury of Englishmen; he must have at least one half of foreign race and birth. No matter from what lineage he is sprung, be it ever so base; from what coast he has come hither, be it ever so hostile; before what gods he bends, be they ever so savage; by what barbarities his caste is disfigured, be they ever so revolting he may be a rude idolater from New Holland, or a barbarous soldier of Mahomet, or a vile and prostituted adorer of the Juggernaut ; -he cannot be tried by an English tribunal. But the civilised mulatto, begotten by an English father; born in the bosom of an English settlement; trained, it may be, in the refinements of English society ;—is condemned, by his fellow Christian, to be tried by a jury far more likely to do him injustice, than the English could by possibility be to wrong any infidel on whose superstitious rites the sun ever rose; and he is yet further condemned to hear this fellow Christian boast, that he has done his unfortunate and unoffending brother justice.

It may now be fit, as principles alone, how incontrovertible soever, are rarely appealed to with effect, to ask what interest we have in perpetuating such grievances as these?-what safety there is in keeping up such a cause of offence in all people of colour? And this question may best be solved by enquiring into the importance of the coloured order. Their numbers in Jamaica alone are said to exceed 30,000, and those of the free blacks 10,000. They, therefore, greatly exceed the whites in numerical force; and the mulattoes form one half of the militia-being, from the necessity of the case, freely intrusted with the possession of arms. But how much more important an aspect do those numbers-those armed numbers-wear, when we reflect that they stand between a handful of whites and the sable myriads of African slaves by whom they are surrounded, daily and nightly, in town and in country, in the house and in the field, and to whose divisions and want of concert, but, more than all, want of arms and of leaders, that handful owes its prolonged existence in the Charaibean Seas. Moreover, by natural and political causes, the numbers of the whites are daily decreasing; by the like causes, the mulattoes are on the increase. Then let the wealth of the degraded caste be taken into account. Their property is now reckoned at upwards of three millions. One gentleman of that colour has 150,000. of his own; another, a white planter, left as much to his coloured children; a third left 200,0007. in the same way; and a fourth gave 200,0007. to a mulatto friend who survived him, and 50,000 to a black woman. Among the petitioners who made the late forcible appeal to Parliament, through Dr. Lushington, three inhabitants of one parish were possessed of property to the amount of 120,0007. This is a body of men, we may rest assured, who will wax great in wealth as well as strong in numbers; and it becomes us to think betimes whether it consists best with our interest, and with our safety, to have them for our allies or our enemies

The existence of the grievance is too palpable to be denied; the planters, therefore, essay to mitigate the asperity of its features; and, failing in this too, they would fain persuade us that the true remedy is by sending the coloured men to seek redress individually at the hands of the Colonial Assemblies, from which they are by law excluded. "Go," say they, “and bring in private naturalisation bills, as if you were aliens. The fees are now

diminished, and by paying your attorneys heavy costs, you may gradually, and one by one, succeed to the enjoyment of your just and natural rights." To this the answer is easy, and it is decisive. If the remedy be fit to mention, it must be commensurate with the mischief. Who, then, recommends bringing in eight thousand naturalisation bills? But all-all would pass as a matter of course. Is it so? Then what better reason can you give for the obvious process of consolidating all the eight thousand bills into one general act? The honourable-minded among the mulattoes feel an honest repugnance to seek this kind of relief, which the wealthy only can obtain ; while, from partaking in it at all, the poor are for ever excluded-the poor, upon whom the oppression of the disabling laws presses by far the most severely.

We have said much on this painfully interesting question; yet the subject remains unexhausted. The legislature of the mother country has been powerfully appealed to; the whites of the colonies have begun to feel its pressure; there have, within the last two years, been petitions from the whites in parishes of Jamaica, bearing to their Assembly, and to us at home, the unsuborned testimony of most unsuspected witnesses against one of the worst practical evils which the destruction of the grand evil of all, the African Slave Trade, has left behind it. Threats are much objected to by the Islands, and justly, if any one ever launched such threats at them. But there is a difference between a threat and a warning-a vain, braggart menace, and a fair, open, timely notice. The duty of the Imperial Legislature is to act as the rights of its colonial subjects and the safety of the state demand; and to discharge its own functions for the common good, if the Colonial Assemblies forget or abandon theirs. Incident to this high duty towards the Empire, is another towards the Assemblies, the neglect whereof would give these jealous bodies just cause of complaint. It is fitting to give them due intimation of what must be done in England, if nothing be done in the West Indies. Then, there is a wide difference between acting upon this solemn warning and doing the just things which will render all proceedings here unnecessary, and basely yielding to the menace of an adversary, and doing wrong to escape from his anger. Let not the Assemblies, then, any longer neglect this warning. It has oftentimes been given, no doubt, and by a power most slow to follow it up-but followed up it will and it must be, unless right and justice have ceased to find favour in the sight of England.

NATURAL DEATH OF SLAVERY.*

There are many subjects which must be approached with caution, on account of the magnitude of the interests they are supposed to involve: but there are many also, as to which it ultimately turns out that the caution, so suggested, has only increased the hazards it was adopted to obviate, and embarrassed instead of facilitating the efforts it was expected to favour. The

A Short Review of the Slave Trade and Slavery, with Considerations on the Benefit which would arise from cultivating Tropical Productions by Free Labour. Vol. xlvi. p. 490. October, 1827.

VOL. V.

wise and philanthropic persons who struggled so gloriously for the abolition of the Slave Trade, were enemies of course to the state of slavery generally, and must have looked forward to its total abolition, as the natural consummation of their system. But, aware of the great influence of the West India proprietors, they feared that their whole scheme might be crushed in its outset, if they had ventured in the beginning to propose so extensive a reformation. They confined themselves, therefore, to the abolition of that detestable traffic; and trusted, we fear upon very insufficient grounds, to the effect of that measure in gradually mitigating and at last extinguishing altogether, the miseries of servitude. Experience, however, has shown how completely this reliance has been disappointed; and instead of finding that the abolition of the trade has led to the mitigation or gradual extinction of slavery-the best-informed advocates of the negroes are now compelled to look to the mitigation of slavery as their best security for the substantial repression of the trade. This is distinctly stated in the 19th Report of the African Institution. "As in the Abolition of the Slave Trade," they say, "we originally sought the mitigation of slavery, so are we now driven to consider whether any other efficient means are left us, than that of reversing our course of proceeding; and whether we must not look henceforward to the mitigation and extinction of Slavery, as our only security for the abolition of the Slave Trade. We cannot, unfortunately, compel other nations to abandon it; and it seems too probable that they are not to be persuaded: but by a determined encouragement of free labour we may make it not worth pursuing." The error of the early abolitionists upon the subject is well worth pointing out; for it still continues, we fear, to perplex our policy on this most important topic. They supposed that an advance in the price of slaves, and the impossibility of procuring fresh supplies by importation, would induce the planters to take better care of them. But this they would not have expected, if they had duly considered the nature of the system; for high prices of produce and of slaves (which are in fact synonymous are, in truth, the very foundations of slavery, aud enhance all its evils, by enabling the masters to pay for the luxury of cruelty and oppression; whilst, on the contrary, its approaching extinction is always announced by a gradually diminishing value, both of slaves and of produce, until it almost imperceptibly glides into freedom. Men will always maintain themselves more cheaply than they can be maintained by another; and will always do more work for their own maintenance and emolument than for the mere profit of a master. Wherever labourers can be had in abundance, therefore, and the produce of labour is consequently at its lowest price, it is impossible that slaves can be profitably maintained; and it is only an unnaturally high, or monopoly price, both of labour and its products, that can support that most unnatural and detestable institution.

We are disposed to attribute to a forgetfulness of these plain principles. the course which has been pursued by Mr. Huskisson, who appears in some degree to have thrown the broad shield of his influence over a system completely at variance with his general principles, not only in the last debate upon the question of the East India trade, but also in a former debate on that subject, when he is reported to have said that he knew opinions were entertained out of that House, but he was happy to say not in it, that low prices of produce were productive of benefit to the slaves." Now, if the competition of free labour has been the means of changing slavery into free

dom, in all countries where that happy change has been made, and if it can only have had that effect by reducing the price of the article produced, to the great ultimate benefit both of the labourer and his employer, we cannot but think that this statement gives a very unsatisfactory view of the principles both of the ministers and of the legislature. If true, however, it may serve to abate our surprise at the late Report of the Directors of the British, Irish, and Colonial Silk Company, which company had the sanction of the names of several members of the administration, and in which we find it stated, that the directors had every disposition to extend this branch of culture to the West India Islands; favourable arrangements were anticipated, both from the Government and the House of Assembly, and a large tract of country would have been obtained in the mountainous districts; but after very minute enquiry, the price of labour was found to oppose an insurmountable obstacle to any attempt in that quarter." This, it must be owned, was a wonderful discovery, to have been made by such very minute enquiries, under the direction of the first ministers of state! It is well that they did not also discover that the means (viz. bounties and prohibitions of all rival commodities), which render the culture of sugar profitable, might do just the same for the culture of silk, notwithstanding the "high price of labour."

Some of the most enlightened statesmen of the United States, we observe, are patronising a scheme for the colonization of free blacks, and contemplating the expenditure of very large sums of money to relieve their country in this way from the farther extension, and also to effect the ultimate extinction, of the acknowledged and the enormous evils of slavery and yet a fuller examination, we conceive, could not fail to convince them that the increase of the slave population, which they seem so much to dread, and the competition of the free labour of those very black men they are now sending away, is the natural and the certain means of extinguishing slavery, while their proceedings must tend to strengthen and perpetuate its bonds. Even the little we have now said should be enough, we think, to prove the necessity of further investigation: and why is this not to take place? Because, forsooth, the great interest the colonists have in the question makes it impossible to discuss it without irritation. The corn growers, the ship owners, and the silk manufacturers, all of them considered that their interests were involved in the monopoly enjoyed by their different trades; and yet this did not prevent the investigation of the subject, or an attempt to remove those monopolies. The only difference is, that, in this case, humanity calls for a change, as loudly as sound policy; and therefore, it seems, it must not be attempted, because there will be irritation if the subject be thoroughly discussed! If human suffering were not involved in the question, the case would be investigated sooner, and the system of slavery would sooner be abolished. This does seem to us very strange doctrine. In the beginning of the discussion, many of the friends of humanity rejected all considerations of policy; and now it seems as if they must turn round and reject all considerations of humanity, if they wish to hasten the accomplishment of their object. Whether this circumstance ought to occasion delay or not, it is an admitted fact that it does so; and, that we may now avoid this dreadful irritation, we shall take care to speak of slaves only as we would do of any other property. The question of free trade, as respects West Indian property, plainly needs not involve any irritation, unless the