XXXI. 1833. had acquired homes and all the endearments and enjoy- CHAP. ments of domestic existence. Experience had proved that the African race was capable not only of maintaining its own numbers, but of rapidly augmenting on the other side of the Atlantic. Eight hundred thousand negroes in the British West India Islands had already formed the nucleus of a vast sable population in the Gulf of Mexico; and on the adjoining American shores the negro race for long augmented faster than the Anglo-Saxons in the southern states of the Union.* The designs of Providence were rapidly approaching their completion; the savage was on a great scale brought in contact with the European, in regions where civilisation was accessible, and improvement could be attained. 81. effect of their estates cessation of trade. Towards this blessed consummation, the stoppage of the slave trade in 1807 by the British Government emi- Salutary nently contributed. In all schemes of human improve- fixing the ment, it is of the last importance that the interests of the negroes on agents employed in conducting it should be brought to from the bear upon the social changes from which amelioration is the slave expected; indeed, unless this is the case, little durable or really beneficial is in general to be expected. But the stoppage of the slave trade at that period did this in the most eminent degree, for it rendered their preservation and increase essential to their masters' interest. His > estates could not be cultivated by any other means. The well-being of the negro was secured by the same motive as the care of his cattle, or mules, or buildings; they were essential to the production of his income. Under the influence of these causes, the African race not only * The scale has now turned the other way; the whites in America are increasing somewhat faster than the blacks, as the following table proves :From 1790 to 1830, increase of whites, 80 per cent. -American Population Returns, 1840; CAREY On Colonisation, p. 37; TOCQUE- XXXI. 1833. CHAP. maintained their own numbers in the West India Islands, but they were rapidly advancing in the career of industry, comfort, and usefulness. The West Indies at that period, with a population of 800,000 souls, consumed annually £3,800,000 worth of British manufactures, being nearly £5 a-head; a fact which speaks volumes as to their general well-being, and exceeding the average consumption of the British Islands, and one hundred times that of Russia. Many cases of cruelty and oppression, without doubt, occurred where so many unscrupulous masters were invested with despotic power; but, generally speaking, the condition of the negroes was eminently prosperous, and incomparably more so than it had been in their native seats in Africa. Dwelling in cottages which, by a prescriptive usage, had become their own, surrounded by their gardens, their fruits, their children, they exhibited, generally speaking, a spectacle rarely witnessed in this world of care, and to which the eye of the philanthropist might turn with pleasure, even from the brightest scenes of European civilisation. Doubtless the character of the master affected in a great degree the prosperity of his subjects, and the cruel or unfeeling had ample means of wreaking their vengeance on a helpless But those were the exceptions, not the rule. the great majority of cases, the negroes on the estates were in such easy and affluent circumstances as would hardly be credible if not supported on undoubted and concurring testimony. 82. race. In They had generally two days a-week, besides Sunday, Prosperous during which they might work in their gardens or at dition of the day's wages on their own account; and so prolific was negroes. nature in that benignant climate, and such the reward of general con industry and good conduct, that industrious labourers, after having provided themselves and their families better than any peasantry in Europe, could lay by from their earnings thirty pounds a-year. Their cottages were generally comfortable, often elegant; artificial wants, XXXI. 1833. civilised vanities, were rapidly making progress among CHAP. them; and the cheering spectacle of 40,000 negroes in Jamaica having worked out or obtained by good conduct their own freedom, and prosecuting with respectability and success the paths of honest industry, warranted the hope that the sable race in the end might become capable of bearing emancipation; and that, by permitting Time to work out the great social change from bondage to freedom with its usual slow pace and unerring wisdom, it might be effected, as it had been in many countries of modern Europe, in so gradual a manner as to render it impossible to say when the one ceased and the other began. 83. should have been done ernment. In these circumstances, the course which a wise Government should have pursued, in justice alike to the What negroes, the planters, and the empire, was clearly this :I. They should have lowered to a very moderate amount by the Govthe existing heavy duty of 24s. a hundredweight on imported sugar, considering the sugar of Jamaica as much a part of domestic produce as the wheat of Essex. II. They should have cautiously introduced such changes as might, in the course of generations, have trained the negroes to the habits requisite for freedom, and enabled them to bear its excitements without danger to themselves and the community. The general establishment or encouragement of marriage, prohibition to separate by sale parent and child, husband and wife, or to sell the slaves away from the estate, are the most important of these means. III. The practice, which by usage had become general, should have been declared by law universal, of allowing them two days in the week to work on their own account, and prohibiting all work for their masters on Sundays. IV. A right should have been declared in the negro to purchase his freedom from his master as soon as he could accumulate the market value of his labour, which varied in general from £40 to £60. By these means, which are precisely those which the Spaniards had practised with such success on the mainland XXXI. 1833. CHAP. of South America, and which are gradually changing serfage into freedom in Russia, those only would have been liberated from the restraints of slavery who had afforded a convincing proof that they had acquired those of civilisation; full justice would have been done to the planters, by their receiving in every instance the full market-value of the slave; the negro population would have been gradually mingled with a free black race, capable of influencing them by their example, and teaching them by their habits. Thus the vast transition from savage to civilised life would have been accomplished, as it had been in Europe and some parts of Southern America, so gradually as to be at once imperceptible and unattended with danger. 84. A cause at once simple and irresistible has, in every Necessity of part of the world, in a certain stage of society, led to early times. the establishment of slavery. It is necessity. Such is slavery in the invariable aversion of savage man to continuous and severe labour, that this repugnance has never been overcome in any part of the world but by the introduction and long continuance of the forced labour which forms the essence of slavery. When the easy, but casual and precarious, supply of animal wants by the chase is exhausted, the human race would everywhere perish or become stationary, if, before the moral chains of artificial wants were thrown round civilised, the physical restrictions of servitude were removed from savage man. As the forced labour of slaves is thus essential, for thousands of years, to the existence and progress of the species, so, in the circumstances in which it is required, it is the greatest possible blessing even to those whom in ignorance we pity for being subjected to its severities. Bad as is often the condition of the slave, it is, in early stages of society, better than the destitution of freedom. To the captive in war it is the price of life, to the humble in peace it is the condition of existence. Food from a master is of value in all stages of society; in the early, before it can XXXI. 1833. be obtained in any other way, it is inappreciable. Slavery CHAP. is a blessing when it first aims to soften the rigours of war out of the necessities of pristine existence; it becomes a curse when it is continued under circumstances when, from the altered condition of society, it is no longer required. 85. emancipa the planters. jected by In justice to the English nation, which forced through, against the wishes of a large portion of the legislature, Progressive the measure of unqualified emancipation at this time, it tion was remust be stated that the colonists in the West Indies had, with unpardonable obstinacy, rejected the proposals of gradual amelioration of the negro population which had been made to them by the British Government. In particular, Mr Canning, in 1823, had urged upon the local legislature of the West India Islands the adoption of certain measures calculated to effect the gradual abolition of slavery, and in the mean time sensibly ameliorate the condition of the slaves. Resolutions in terms of these propositions were unanimously adopted by Parliament.* But they met with a very unfavourable reception in the West Indies. Great alarm was felt there, not so much at what was actually proposed, as at the idea of interference by the imperial legislature at all; a state of things fraught, in their opinion, with great and immediate danger, and likely to excite the negro population to the worst atrocities. Mr Canning's resolutions, indeed, were at first looked upon as declaratory merely-as words not likely to lead to any practical result. It soon appeared, however, that this was not to be the case.1 The resolutions of the 130. House of Commons were laid before the King in council, * The resolutions proposed by Mr Canning, and adopted by the House of Commons, consisted in abolishing the use of the lash in the field, or its application, under any circumstances, to females; regulating the punishment of refractory slaves; preventing the separation, by sale, of husband, wife, and children; protecting the property of slaves, admitting their evidence in courts of justice, facilitating their manumission, and providing for their religious instruction by a regular ecclesiastical establishment, with two bishops at its head, one presiding over Jamaica, the other over the Leeward Islands.-Parl. Deb. vol. xi. pp. 968, 976. May 24, 1 1823. Parl. Deb. 360; Ann. Reg. 1823, ix. 285, 286, |