CHAP. with a ruinous drain upon the metallic resources of this XLIII. 1846. 12. country? "If slave sugar is admitted, and the price of that Continued. article is in consequence diminished 6s. per cwt., somebody must be a loser if the consumers in this country are gainers. This difference of price will go into the pockets of the Cuba or Brazilian slave planter, or it will be taken from those of the British West India colonists and those engaged in the commerce of their productions. Was such a loss as this ever voluntarily inflicted by a legislature on one portion of its subjects? It is boasted on the other side, that if this bill passes, it will save the British consumers from £1,500,000 to £2,000,000 a-year. Be it so. That sum is violently wrested from the West India planters, already labouring under the accumulated difficulties arising from the emancipation of the negroes, and who had adventured the last wreck of their fortunes in the attempt to stay the ruin, on the assurance that the Legislature would never so far recede in its career as to restore slavery and the slave trade, after having made such efforts for its suppression. If this bill passes, many of the most respectable merchants in that once wealthy trade will, before many weeks are over, be in the Gazette, and these splendid islands, once the pride and glory of England, will become a wilderness, inhabited only by savage and wild beasts. 13. The "Is the country prepared to violate all its resolutions, Continued. abandon all its endeavours, contradict all its professions, render itself contemptible in the eyes of men, guilty in the sight of Heaven, by restoring the slave trade after having made such efforts for its abolition? Mr O'Connell has put the matter plainly and forcibly. question is cheap sugar with slavery, or dearer sugar without it. It is nothing else than the repetition of the children's fable-the large loaf or the father's curse. It is a farce to let in the sugars of Cuba and Brazil, and at the same time to propose or continue emancipation.' No XLIII. 1846. one regrets the twenty millions paid as the price of CHAP. emancipation; no one grudges the forty-nine vessels of war, 7000 men and 700 guns, now employed in repressing that infernal traffic. But what excuse can we make for ourselves, what a figure will we make in the eyes of the world, if at the very time when we are paying £1,500,000 as the interest of the loan borrowed, and the expense of these armaments, we are making a present of a similar or larger sum to the slave growers of Cuba and Brazil, and that too at the expense of our own fellow-countrymen in the West Indies, who have struggled on in opposition to overwhelming difficulties, in reliance on our philanthropic professions? The profits which the slaveowners will make of this measure are immense. If the price of sugar is raised by it to them £6 a ton, and each negro make three tons a-year, the annual value of the slave labour is increased £18. Supposing he lasts ten years, there is £180 added to the value of the slave, which at present is £81! What a fearful encouragement are we about to give to the accursed traffic which we professed ourselves so desirous to abolish! 14. "It has often been said, but it cannot be too often repeated, that the slave trade which the bill now under Continued. consideration goes to strengthen and restore, is a species of that infernal traffic far worse, as well as more extensive, than that of which Mr Wilberforce effected the abolition forty years ago. Imagination cannot conceive, the pen almost refuses to record, the lips can scarcely be brought to utter, the horrors of this awful traffic as it is now proposed to be re-established. Six years ago Mr Fowell Buxton said in this house, that such had been the impulse given to the slave trade by the emancipation of the negroes that 250,000 negroes annually passed the Atlantic; and Lord Aberdeen said, in 1844, that the average number of slaves annually imported into the Southern States of North America and the Spanish West Indies alone, was 100,000 a-year. This year above 16,000 were imported into Rio 1846. CHAP. Janeiro alone. Is it to a trade of such gigantic dimensions, XLIII. so much exceeding what our own slave trade was in its worst days, that you are prepared to give the immense additional impulse arising from the present measure, which will at once more than double the value of every imported slave? But melancholy as the vast increase of the slave trade, from the effect of our measures, has been, it is as nothing compared to the augmented horrors of the traffic, which, in the hands of the Spaniards and Portuguese, have now reached a pitch never before equalled, and which apparently it is impossible to exceed. By the Passenger Act in Great Britain, which regulated the slave trade while it was legal, five tons were allowed for each slave; but as it is now practised, there are five or six slaves to one ton. The slave-deck is 2 feet 10 inches high; and, in one instance, 349 human beings were embarked on board a vessel 67 feet long by 21 broad, with a measure of from 80 to 100 tons. Such are the sufferings of the poor wretches crammed into these holes, where they are for days and weeks enduring the agonies of suffocation, that they are sometimes driven by the madness induced by suffering into revolt; but in such cases the arms and discipline of the Europeans generally prevail, and after forty or fifty have been massacred, the rest are flogged in so merciless a manner that death would be a relief to their prolonged sufferings.* "Let us not deceive ourselves, therefore we are about to pass a measure which will restore the slave trade in "Those who were thus executed were heavily ironed; a rope was then put round their necks, which was rove through the yard-arm, and they were run up from the deck. By this means they were not hanged, they were strangled or choked, and in that state, while still alive, they were shot in the breast, and then thrown overboard. If there were two shot or hanged together, they were run up in the same manner, until their legs were laid across the rail of the bulwark on the ship's side, and then they were broken, and chopped off to save the irons. In this way the bleeding body of a negro was thrown overboard to make way for another. The legs of about a dozen were chopped off in that manner. When the bleeding feet fell on the deck, they were picked up by the Brazilian crew, and then thrown overboard after the body; sometimes they pelted the body with them in sport while it hung half alive. When XLIII. 1846. 15. far more than its pristine horrors. When on the verge CHAP. of sealing it up by our powerful navy on the coast of Africa, we shall reopen it in a new legitimised channel, and in a form which will set at nought all the vigilance of Concluded. our cruisers. Already France is cordially co-operating with us for the extinction of this infernal traffic, and even in Cuba and Brazil themselves a better feeling has arisen. Yet at this very moment, with the goal almost in view, we abandon the race, relinquish the good fight, and restore the trade in augmented strength and aggravated horrors. This bill will render nugatory all our former exertions for the abolition of the slave trade. The 150,000 negroes now annually imported from Africa will be fearfully augmented by the bounty we are preparing to give for their introduction. Free labour in our own colonies can never compete with slave labour, unless the slave-market of Africa. is closed; and by the profits with which this measure will cause the slave trade to be attended, it will be reopened with more effect than ever. Eighty thousand human beings, the half of those imported, will be hurried by it, amidst excruciating tortures, into eternity! And this, in the year 1846, is the first act of a Liberal Government, and the earnest of the measures they are prepared to adopt 173, 191. in the service of humanity!" 1 1 Parl. Deb. 34,54; Ann. lxxxviii. Reg. 1846, Sir R. Peel pursued a very singular but eminently 16. characteristic course on this occasion. He stated that the Sir R. Peel's singular bill before the house was widely different from what conduct, he intended to have introduced, and that he thought ing of the the West Indies was an exceptional case to the general bill. two, chained together, were to be hung, they were shot while they remained suspended, and then thrown overboard while still alive. The women were shot in the neck, and thrown over while still living. Several of them were seen to struggle in the water for some time before they sunk. After this slaughter was done, about twenty were brought up and flogged. The women were flogged as well as the men. Such was the severity of the flogging they received that they were obliged to lie on their bellies during the remainder of the voyage; and on the backs of some the flesh had putrified and fallen off in pieces of six or eight inches in diameter."-Account of the Treatment of the Slaves on board Lenordi Fonseca's Ship, quoted by Lord G. Bentinck in Parl. Deb. lxxxviii. 49, 50. and pass XLIII. 1846. CHAP. principles of free trade. Situated as he was, however, he declared his intention to support the bill, not because he approved of it, for he agreed with all Lord George Bentinck had said on the abomination of the traffic in slaves, and thought the reduction of duties on foreign slave sugar should be much more gradual, but simply because, if the bill were thrown out, which might "easily be done," "the Ministry would resign, and the country would have three Ministries within three weeks, and the new Ministry would revoke the measure regarding the Corn Laws which had been just passed." Then he declared that the abandonment of Protection in the British Islands compelled him to surrender it in the West Indies also. The result was, that Sir R. Peel, and all the Liberal Conservatives, as they began to be called, voted with the Ministry, and the bill was carried by a majority of 130, the numbers being 265 to 135. This was probably a tolerably accurate index of the strength of the purely Protectionist party, as compared with the united Whigs, and Liberal or urban Conservatives. In the House of Lords the majority was only 18, but that was in a very thin House of 28 members only. Every one Ann. Reg. saw that the battle of native industry had been fought and lost, and that, for good or for evil, free trade, in every department, was to be the destiny of the State.1 1 Parl. Deb. lxxxviii. 179, 182; 1846, 185, 192. 17. this mea sure to the West In dies. Thus was protection finally taken from the West Result of Indies, and the principle of free trade carried out, even in that quarter, where its advocates admitted its application was most open to exception. Thus, also, it may now be confidently stated, were the WEST INDIES FINALLY RUINED. This is now proved by the decisive evidence of facts. For some years after the bill was passed, and before the rapidly declining rate of import duty on foreign slave sugar, the planters made immense efforts, hoping, as is often the case, to be able to compensate the reduction of price by increase of production; and though the returns exhibited a falling off in the principal articles of production, it was not so considerable as |