which I may resume towards its end, since it is, perchance, best calculated to destroy that monotony which generally attends a straight forward description even of the most interesting places. Before commencing, however, to express my opinions on emancipation, opinions which I have been nearly four years in forming, I must again remind my readers that I have no interest in the West Indies or even among West Indians; and when I assert this fact so often, and so positively, I entreat them to regard those opinions as the unbiased and unprejudiced sentiments of a man who, when expressing them, declares, again and again, that he has no other motive but that of making known the truth. CHAPTER XLII. SLAVERY AS IT IS THE NEGRO AND THE PEASANTQUESTION OF EMANCIPATION. "Unless we are infatuated by the mere sound of a word, we "must acknowledge that the power of doing whatever a man pleases, if unaccompanied by some moral stimulus which shall "insure habitual industry and correct the profligate propensities "of savage nature, is so far from being a step in advance, that it "is rather a stride backwards; instead of being a blessing it is plainly a curse."—Coleridge. 66 : THAT slavery is an evil, and an evil of the first magnitude, few will pretend to deny that every evil should be remedied if possible is another important truism; but if the remedy be more dangerous than the disease, if the antidote be more injurious than the bane, we ought in no case to apply either the one or the other, and that a hasty emancipation would be more dangerous than slavery in its existing state, hard as the task may prove, I will endeavour to explain. Bad habits are not conquered in a day, and slavery has existed for ages. That nefarious and abominable trade in which man bartered with man for the sale of his fellow creatures, had no sooner sprung into being, than it was allowed, encouraged, and protected by the British government. British ships imported their victims to the plantations; and civilised nations forgot that black men should be free by all the laws of reason and of right, when they remembered, that by making them slaves, they could enrich their coffers and cultivate their lands. In time the wealth of the Colonies increased, and with it the wealth of England, then the trade became as common as sin, and vessels were as regularly sent for their cargoes of Africans as they are now for their cargoes of sugar. Men, women, and children, were huddled together in their dark, stifling, and gloomy prison-houses; their wants unheeded, their comforts forgotten, and humanity abused. The savage beings who had charge of them regarded not the misery of their victims, but mocked the woe of their captives with sounds of revelry and joy. The song was merrily sung, "Mid howl and yell, and shuddering moan, "The cards were dealt, the dice were thrown, 66 They staked their share of gain." And when disease and sickness fell deep and heavy on the heads of thousands of the chained, when the sufferings of the body were added to those of the mind, They dared not move, they could not weep, "They could but lie and moan; "Some, not in mercy, to the deep, "Like damaged wares, were thrown." But this was not all. When they were landed, when they were sold, when they were given over to their inhuman masters, and sent to toil in woe for others, and to gain wealth for white men by the sweat of their brow, then, no allowance was made either for their indignation or their pain; and they were soothed for the miseries of their voyage, and for the dreadful separation from all they held most dear, with the scoffings of an inhuman driver, or the barbarous application of the whip. And so they toiled on and resisted not; for they had drunk the dreadful cup of slavery to the very dregs, and the bitter draught had crushed their spirits, and broken their hearts. Where then, I ask, was the penetration and the humanity of Englishmen; that they saw and pitied not, or if they saw and pitied, called not for emancipation? That Great Britain, however, did see, and not only saw, but encouraged the importation, as well as the maintenance, of slaves, is as positive and certain as it was culpable and disgraceful. Thrice did our Colonies endeavour to discourage this barter of their fellow creatures; thrice did they attempt to limit, and once entirely to destroy this abominable importation; and thrice did England venture to thwart those endeavours, and to resist those attempts. Thrice did she declare, by means of her Board of Trade, "that "she could not allow the Colonies to check or discourage in any degree a traffic so beneficial to the "nation."* However, thanks be to God and to humanity, that nefarious traffic has been discontinued, and slavery itself has cast off the rude habit of barbarism, and put on the fairer garb of amelioration and improvement. The light of religion has dawned in upon the children of the chained; and education is spreading far and wide its glorious rays, and preparing the slaves for freedom and emancipation; blessings which they have an undoubted right to claim, but blessings which it would be an injustice, and even a cruelty, not to their master, for he may have reaped his golden harvest of wealth, and filled his coffers by their labors, but to themselves and to their children, to bestow upon them in their present state. What this present state is the people of England know not because they know not, they conjecture,and those conjectures lead them as far from the truth as the fair and boyish dreams of happiness and bliss are from the experience of those bitter realities—care and sorrow. To say, however, that Englishmen had so conjectured without reason would be to do them an injustice; they have had reasons, but those reasons were drawn from ill sources; from works published in open day, and containing misstatements, perhaps not intentionally wrong, but at all events unfounded and untrue. The fact is, that men, lovers of freedom, would to Heaven they had been lovers of Vide" Barclay's Present State of Slavery in the West Indies." |