Indies? Let those who have tried the compulsory labour of convicts in New South Wales, or of parish paupers in England, be consulted, and their report will uniformly be, that they would prefer paying high wages to the free labourer, rather than be forced to employ, for his bare food and clothing, the convict or the pauper, who derives no benefit from his exertions. Now the Negro slave derives no benefit from his exertions in his master's service, beyond that of saving his skin from the lash. And why should he do more than is sufficient for this purpose? As for food, and clothing, and shelter, and medicine, he must have some share of these, or he can do no work at all; any more than a horse or a mule that is not fed. Let the Reviewer, therefore, try the effect of higher motives of wages, for instance-before he inflicts upon the Negro his metaphysical malediction, and excludes him from the brotherhood of humanity. If we look around the West Indies, we shall find many thousands of emancipated slaves and their descendants, toiling industriously, accumulating property, acquiring knowledge, fulfilling the relative duties of life, rising into moral distinction, and struggling manfully and perseveringly, but submissively, against the civil and political evils which tend to crush their efforts.-"Oh, but," says the Reviewer, "they will not cultivate sugar collectively." Be it so; and what then? Shall we not be able to procure sugar for our tea and coffee, because the free Negroes of the West Indies may not choose to cultivate the cane in gangs?

Is not the Reviewer aware that the Negro slaves in the West Indies even now voluntarily raise, in considerable quantities, for their own benefit, such articles as they dare to raise or cultivate, and will bring a good price in the market-such as hogs, fish, poultry, firewood, grass, vegetable provisions, and fruit? As for "

sugar, cotton, coffee, cocoa, or other goods or merchandise of any

sort," (see St. Vincent's Law, clause 73,) they are by law interdicted from selling them, under severe penalties. But if the Negroes in the West Indies were permitted to grow the sugar-cane in the same way as the Ryotts in the East, and could obtain a ready market for it at an adjacent manufactory, why should they not cultivate the sugar-cane? The same stimulus at least would exist in this case, which now exists for their raising, during the brief pittance of time granted them to provide food for themselves and their families, that superfluous quantity of yams and plantains, and those oranges and pine-apples and pigs and poultry, with which they supply so abundantly the markets of the islands. Can the Reviewer assign any good reason why they should not grow sugar-cane to supply the neighbouring mill, as readily as they now grow other articles b supply the demand of distant town; or does he fear that labourers coud not be hired to assist in manufæturing sugar, if adequate wages wire offered?

The advocates of slavery, a of every bad cause, are very inonsistent in their reasonings. I has become the fashion among thm of late, to represent in glowing and certainly exaggerated, colous the property accumulated by slaves, the produce of their own volunary labour during the fragment of time allowed them by their masters. Thus, Sir Ralph Woodford tells us how the slaves in Trinidad may amass much beyond the wants of the utmost ambition or profligacy. Thus, Mr. R., Hibbert decribes the slaves on his estate of Georgia as wallowing in abundane. Thus, a Dr. Stobo, with a parale of minute statistical research, ha produced a flaming account of poperty accumulated by the slavs of Tortola. In short, we hear from all quarters of the West Indies, not only of the desire of the Negoes to acquire property, but of their efficiently employing the mans within their

power to that end. And under what circumstances is this effected? With a mere scantling of time at their own disposal; with every temptation to seek repose, in preference to active employment, which can be supplied by natural indolence, or by the exhaustion of unremunerated labour, under the lash, during five or six days of the week, for the benefit of another; they nevertheless so diligently and skilfully appropriate that scantling, either in cultivating their grounds, or in working for hire, as to add greatly to their comforts, and even to amass wealth. Such is actually the statement, not only of many of the West Indians, but of the Quarterly Reviewer himself, in his 58th Number (pp. 491 and 492).

The Reviewer's difficult and perplexing problem is therefore already solved. He himself may be adduced to prove, that a stimulus has been already found of far greater potency than the whip; although he seems to cleave to the whip as alone capable of rendering the labour of the Negro beneficial to the planter. He will find it hard, by the utmost exertion of his metaphysical skill, to convince reasoning men in this country, that, if a Negro will work industriously, from moral motives, on a Sunday or Saturday, he will not also be influenced by the same motives to work industriously on the other five days of the week. The problem, then, is already solved, by the concurrent testimony of the West Indians and the Reviewer. Their own statements and admissions, if followed out to all their consequences, would be sufficient to prove, not only that the Negroes are fit for freedom, but that their freedom would be a pecuniary benefit, no less to their masters than to themselves.

The Reviewer says, he is anxious for a fair and temperate inquiry into this subject. So are the Abolitionists. Twice has Mr. Whitmore attempted to obtain a Committee of the House of Commons to investi

One word on the manifest hostility of the Reviewer to the Antislavery cause. With a very imposing gravity he admonishes the Abolitionists, that "those who advance facts of the correctness of which they are not absolutely certain, allow themselves a latitude very nearly approaching to criminality." This is, without doubt, a very just remark. But he goes on: "We are sometimes afraid that there are persons engaged in polemical controversy upon this subject, so hurried on by their detestation of slavery, so morbidly anxious for its extinction, that they are disposed to adopt the most dangerous of all human principles of action,-that the end may occasionally sanctify the employment of means which in themselves, and abstractedly taken, cannot be justified."-Has the Reviewer, then, no fear at all with respect to those who take the opposite side in this controversy? Are there no criminal misrepresentations to be apprehended on the part of those who love, as well as on the part of those who detest, slavery? no dishonourable means to be suspected among their partisans, of attaining an end which they deem important? And is it no indication of the partiality of the Reviewer, that he should feel it necessary to preach exclusively to the Abolitionists, as if they alone were capable of resorting to base and unworthy arts to promote their objects? But on what does the Reviewer found his severe admonition to

them? Instead of this dark insinuation against the honesty of their principles, would it not have been more manly to have denounced the detected delinquency on which he grounds his reproof? We know of no representation they have made half so inaccurate, or, being inaccurate, half so mischievous, as some mistakes into which he himself has fallen.

But he is averse to their system of diffusing a knowledge of the real nature of slavery through the land; nay, he decidedly reprobates it." And why does he reprobate it? The reason is curious: "We do not object," he says, "in the slightest degree, to a deep-rooted hatred of slavery, or a thorough knowledge upon that or any other subject." This is precisely the kind of preface to be expected when a man is about to defend slavery, or to plead against diffusing a knowledge of it. He therefore proceeds-" But we protest against this thorough knowledge or deep-rooted hatred being confounded with religious feeling, or employed for party purposes." There is really something ludicrous in this sort of protest. Does the Reviewer mean, that we are not to decide the question of slavery on religious grounds? That in this case alone we are not to try our conduct by the immutable principles of right and wrong which are laid down in the word of God? That in this case alone we are not to appeal to the Christian maxim of doing to others as we would they should do unto us? That here alone we are not to bring into operation that Divine charity, which seeks to relieve our fellow-creatures from temporal misery and oppression, from mental degradation, and from spiritual death? And what, again, does he mean by party purposes? Is it, that the energies which are enlisted in favour of the freedom and happiness of mankind, in favour of the oppressed against his oppressor, are to be likened to a scramble for place, or some paltry question of party

politics? Who are the parties? On one side, 800,000 colonial bondsmen, with nearly the entire British nation: on the other, less than 2000 proprietors of sugar estates (for the question, even as the Reviewer himself has put it, has now become a sugar question), aided by those in this country whom their Parliamentary influence, or their good dinners, or their common hostility to Saintship, or the mere ties of blood or interest, may attach to their cause. Party purposes! Yes, the purposes of truth and justice and humanity-the promotion of the universal freedom of man-the cause of morality and religion-the cause of their country-the cause of God! May the people of England, young and old, be ever found devoted to such purposes! the zealous, unswerving, unshrinking partisans of such a cause!

The Reviewer, however, accuses the Abolitionists of acting immorally. He charges them with being guilty of a breach of faith in agitating this question. He says, "Parliament having deliberately placed in the hands of the Executive Government the solution of this difficult and fearful question, we consider it a breach of public faith to thwart and impede their measures."-It is certainly a begging of the question, that the Abolitionists thwart and impede the measures of Government. In fact, it is owing to them that Government have taken any measures at all. And as for the compact here spoken of, when was it made, and what are its conditions? Is it binding on one party only, like the Reviewer's admonition, or does it bind both? When was it ever heard before, that because Government or Parliament had entered on the consideration of a great public question, interesting to the feelings of every man in the community, that question was to be withdrawn from free, unrestrained, general discussion; and that those who should venture to discuss it would be guilty of a

breach of public faith? It seems, however, to be the Reviewer's object to silence those only who would advocate the cause of Negro free dom: he accuses them alone of breaking faith with the Government. In what light, then, does he view the whole host of colonial journalists, and of some journalists at home, who have been incessantly pouring out their violent declamations on this subject during the last year? Has he no monitory voice for the Gazettes of Jamaica, Bar badoes, and Demerara; for the Couriers of London and Glasgow; for the Bulls and Blackwoods; for the Bridgeses and Macqueens; for the Martins and Grossetts, et hoc genus omne? These may inundate the world with rant and ribaldry; with misrepresentation and invective; with daily alternations of furious abuse, and ingenious fiction, and mawkish dulness, secure from the Reviewer's castigation. He reserves that exclusively for the Abolitionists. They must be arraigned for breach of faith, if, in order to set their cause right with the people, they do but exhibit a plain statement of facts, and simply expose the misrepresentations of their opponents.

But what has the Quarterly Reviewer, whose high displeasure the Abolitionists have incurred, to say for himself upon this point? Is it no breach of faith in him to have marched into the field of battle, and to have mingled so vigorously and efficiently in the conflict? Mr. Canning's Resolutions, according to him, ought to have shut every man's mouth on the subject: and yet, from the hour when those Resolutions were passed, to the present, who has been the most active and efficient controvertionalist on this interdicted question? Why, the Quarterly Reviewer himself. Already have three ponderous articles proceeded from his pen in support of slavery; all, he would doubtless wish us to believe, in perfect loyalty to the Government. But no sooner CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 273.

does any one, who happens to think differently from him, attempt to parry the deadly blows which, under the guise of a specious but hollow neutrality, he, or others under his shield, have been aiming at the very vitals of the cause of Negro freedom, than our ears are dinned with exclamations of bad faith! This is all very intelligible. But is it also candid and impartial? It is conduct to be excused in a West Indian, but which is utterly reprehensible in a Quarterly Reviewer.

The respectable character of the Quarterly Review makes it difficult to suppose, that, in order to maintain any argument, or to serve any cause, its conductors would wilfully pervert the sense of a writer, by mutilating a passage cited from his work, so as to make him seem to contradict himself, and to inculcate the very opinions which it is his main endeavour to refute. Such, nevertheless, is the effect of the manner in which the Reviewer cites, and reasons upon, the language of Mr. Stephen, in his work entitled "The Crisis of the Sugar Colonies."

In that pamphlet, written and published at the outset of Buonaparte's counter-revolutionary attempt on St. Domingo, and while his true objects were yet veiled with the deepest dissimulation, the author demonstrated that his design was the restitution of slavery, and pointed out the formidable difficulties which would oppose him in that perfidious project. Among the considerations which probably had determined the Chief Consul to make such an attempt, Mr. Stephen noticed the impatient wish he felt for the restitution of the agricultural and commercial interests of France in her colonies, to which Negro liberty seemed to be an insuperable obstacle; and reasoning, as he supposes Buonaparte to do, he puts strongly the contrast between the great productiveness of St. Domingo, when cultivated by slaves, and the then contracted state of its exports :-

"While the Negroes were in 4 F

bondage the colony was rich and flourishing by the effects of their labours; since their enfranchisement it has become a comparatively neglected waste. All the solicitations of the officers of the republic, all the influence and authority of their own favourite chief, have failed to recal them to any tolerable degree of regular industry. What then remains, but either to restore the rigid yoke of the private master, and renew the coercion of the cartwhip, or permanently to leave this fine island in its present unprofitable state?"

After citing this passage, the Reviewer adds, "And is this all that remains? We trust not:"-just as as if the dilemma propounded had been one that the author himself was disposed to maintain, and with reference to the present time; whereas his very next words, following the quoted paragraph, are, "Thus it appears, at first sight, not unnatural for the Chief Consul to reason ;" and he proceeds to shew, in no small part of the work, the unsoundness of such reasoning, and the gross impolicy of the measures founded upon it. It is impossible, we repeat it, that the Quarterly Reviewer could mean to produce the unfair and fallacious effect which is thus produced. But it is, at the same time, very unfortunate that it was not prevented, by adding to his extract those two important lines, especially as the pamphlet is not now to be bought, and as the whole object of the citation is to mark the opinions of Mr. Stephen, who is styled (unquestionably with perfect truth) one of the most able and indefatigable advocates in the cause of abolition, as being incompatible with those he and his friends now entertain. Even if the Reviewer's intention was to cite this writer, not for opinions the reverse of those he really held, but for the fact of the neglect of agriculture at that time in St. Domingo, it was still no small breach of candour to withhold the explanation of that fact which the

author subjoined. Mr. Stephen ascribed the aversion from agricultural labour among the Haytians, not to any native fault in their character, such as the Reviewer wishes to establish, but to the effects of that odious system which it is his object to palliate. He described the driving method in use upon sugar estates, and pointed out, among its other pernicious consequences, that it precluded the influence of those moral and rational motives, by which a repugnance to regular industry is overcome in the minds of free persons; while it rendered the particular species of labour formerly exacted by the lash, not only degrading, but odious, in the eyes of the enfranchised Negroes.

Besides, if the experiment of St. Domingo had afforded a fair test of the disposition and habits of the African race in an unsophisticated state, it is strange that the Reviewer should go back, for the result of it, to the very commencement of the present century; and stranger still, that he should cite his facts from an author who sets out with carefully guarding himself from all responsibility as to his statements on this subject, on the score of the profound darkness which at that time prevailed in Europe as to the interior state of that island. "From the interior of St. Domingo," says Mr. Stephen, "scarcely one distinct ray has reached our horizon, and its affairs are almost as unknown to Europe, as those of any nation in the centre of Africa."

But soon after this publication, the French official accounts, and an abundance of private information, gave juster views of the effects of Toussaint's wise and beneficent policy; and it appeared, that, notwithstanding all the waste and all the disorders of revolution and of internal wars, agricultural industry had been in no small degree preserved. "The cultivation of the colony," said General Leclerc, in his first official dispatches, "is in