Part 25

The opinion then, which is to guard the slaves from the oppressions of the privileged order, is the opinion of the privileged order itself. A vast authority is intrusted to the master--the law imposes scarcely tiny restraints upon him--and we are required to believe, that the place of all other checks will be fully supplied by the general sense of those who participate in his power and his temptations. This may be reason at Kingston; but will it pass at Westminster? We are not inveighing against the white inhabitants of the West {316}Indies. We do not say that they are naturally more cruel or more sensual than ourselves. But we say that they are men; and they desire to be considered as angels!--we say as angels, for to no human being, however generous and beneficent, to no philanthropist, to no fathers of the church, could powers like theirs be safely intrusted. Such authority a parent ought not to have over his children. They ask very complacently, “Are we men of a different species from yourselves? We come among you;--we mingle with you in all your kinds of business and pleasure;--we buy and sell with you on Change in the morning;--we dance with your daughters in the evening. Are not our manners civil? Are not our dinners good? Are we not kind friends, fair dealers, generous benefactors? Are not our names in the subscription lists of all your charities? And can you believe that we are such monsters as the saints represent us to be? Can you imagine that, by merely crossing the Atlantic, we acquire a new nature?” We reply, You are not men of a different species from ourselves; and, therefore, we will not give you powers with which we would not dare to trust ourselves. We know that your passions are like ours. We know that your restraints are fewer; and, therefore, we know that your crimes must be greater. Are despotic sovereigns men of harder hearts by nature than their subjects? Are they born with a hereditary thirst for blood--with a natural incapacity for friendship? Surely not. Yet what is their general character? False--cruel--licentious---ungrateful. Many of them have performed single acts of splendid generosity and heroism; a few may be named whose general administration has been salutary; but scarcely one has passed through life without committing at least some one atrocious act, from the guilt and infamy of which restricting laws would have saved him and his victims. If Henry VIII. had been a private man, he might have torn his wife’s ruff, and kicked her lap-dog. He was a King, and he cutoff her head--not that his passions were more brutal than those of many other men, but that they were less restrained. How many of the West Indian overseers can boast of the piety and magnanimity of Theodosius? Yet, in a single moment of anger, that amiable prince destroyed more innocent people than all the ruffians in Europe stab in fifty years. Thus it is with a master in the Colonies. We will suppose him to be {317}a good natured man, but subject, like other men, to occasional fits of passion. He gives an order. It is slowly or negligently executed. In England he would grumble, perhaps swear a little. In the West Indies, the law empowers him to indict a severe flogging on the loiterer. Are we very uncharitable in supposing that he will sometimes exercise his privilege?

It by no means follows that a person who is humane in England will be humane to his Negroes in the West Indies. Nothing is so capricious and inconsistent as the compassion of men. The Romans were people of the same flesh and blood with ourselves--they loved their friends--they cried at tragedies--they gave money to beggars;--yet we know their fondness for gladiatorial shows. When, by order of Pompey, some elephants were tortured in the amphitheatre, the audience was so shocked at the yells and contortions by which the poor creatures expressed their agony, that they burst forth into execrations against their favourite general. The same people, in the same place, had probably often given the fatal twirl of the thumb which condemned some gallant barbarian to receive the sword. In our own time, many a man shoots partridges in such numbers that he is compelled to bury them, who would chastise his son for amusing himself with the equally interesting, and not more cruel diversion, of catching flies and tearing them to pieces. The drover goads oxen--the fishmonger crimps cod--the dragoon sabres a Frenchman--the Spanish Inquisition burns a Jew--the Irish gentleman torments a Catholic. These persons are not necessarily destitute of feeling. Each of them would shrink from any cruel employment, except that to which his situation has familiarized him.

There is only one way in which the West Indians will ever convince the people of England that their practice is merciful, and that is, by making their laws merciful. We cannot understand why men should so tenaciously fight for powers which they do not mean to exercise. If the oppressive privileges of the master be nominal and not real, let him cede them, and silence calumny at once and for ever. Let him cede them for his own honour. Let him cede them in compliance with the desire, the vain and superfluous desire, we will suppose, of the people of England. Is the repeal of laws which have become obsolete,--is the prohibition {318}of crimes which are never committed, too great a return for a bounty of twelve hundred thousand pounds, for a protecting duty most injurious to the manufacturers of England and the cultivators of Hindustan, for an army which alone protects from inevitable ruin the lives and possessions of the Colonists?

The fact notoriously is, that West Indian manners give protection even to those extreme enormities against which the West Indian laws provide. We have already adverted to one of the most ordinary sophisms of our opponents. “Why,” they exclaim, “is our whole body to be censured for the depravity of a few? Every society has its miscreants. If we had our Hodge, you had your Thurtell. If we had our Huggins, you had your Wall. No candid reasoner will ground general charges on individual eases.” The refutation is simple. When a community does nothing to prevent guilt, it ought to bear the blame of it. Wickedness, when punished, is disgraceful only to the offender. Unpunished, it is disgraceful to the whole society. Our charge against the Colonists is not that crimes are perpetrated among them, but that they are tolerated. We will give a single instance. Since the West Indians are fond of referring to our Newgate Calendar, we will place, side by side, a leaf from that melancholy Register, and another from the West Indian Annals.

Mr. Wall was Governor at Goree. In that situation he flogged a man to death, on pretence of mutiny. On his return to England, he was indicted for murder. He escaped to the Continent. For twenty years he remained in exile. For twenty years the English people retained the impression of his crime uneffaced within their hearts. He shifted his residence--he disguised his person--he changed his name,--still their eyes were upon him, for evil, and not for good. At length, conceiving that all danger was at an end, he returned. He was tried, convicted, and hanged, amidst the huzzas of an innumerable multitude. (1)

Edward Huggins of Nevis, about fifteen years ago, flogged upwards of twenty slaves in the public market-place, with such severity as to produce the death of one, and to ruin the

(1) We should be far, indeed, from applauding those shouts, if they were the exultation of cruelty; but they arose from the apprehension that Court favour was about to save the criminal; and the feeling expressed was for the triumph of justice.

constitutions {319}of many. He had grossly violated the law of the Colony, which prescribes a limit to such inflictions. He had violated it in open day, and in the presence of a magistrate. He was indicted by the law officer of the crown. His advocate acknowledged the facts, but argued that the act on which he was tried, was passed only to silence the zealots in England, and was never intended to be enforced. Huggins was acquitted! But that was a trifle. Some members of the House of Assembly lost their seats at the next election, for taking part against him. A printer of a neighbouring island was convicted of a libel, merely for publishing an official report of the evidence, transmitted to him by authority. In a word, he was considered as a martyr to the common cause, and grew in influence and popularity; while a most respectable planter, an enlightened and accomplished gentleman, Mr. Tobin, who, nobly despising the prejudices of his class, had called the attention of the government to these diabolical outrages, was menaced with prosecutions, assailed with slanders, and preserved only by blindness from challenges.

Let these cases be compared. We do not say that Wall was not as bad a man as Huggins; but we do say that the English people have nothing to do with the crime of Wall, and that the public character of the people of Nevis suffers seriously by the crime of Huggins. They have adopted the guilt, and they must share in the infamy. We know that the advocates of slavery affect to deride this and similar narratives as old and threadbare. They sneer at them in conversation, and cough them down in the House of Commons. But it is in vain. They are written on the hearts of the people; and they will be remembered when all the smooth nothings of all the official defenders of such transactions are forgotten.

The truth is simply this. Bad laws and bad customs, reciprocally producing and produced by each other, have given to the Whites in all the slave islands--Dutch, Spanish, French and English--a peculiar character, in which almost all the traits, which, in this quarter of the world, distinguish the different nations, are lost. We think we describe that character sufficiently when we call it the despotic character. In nothing does this temper more strongly appear than in the rage and contempt with which the Colonists receive{320} every command, and indeed every admonition, from the authorities of the mother country. When the territorial power and the commercial monopoly of the East India Company haws been at stake, has that great body conducted itself thus? Do even foreign powers treat us in this manner? We have often remonstrated with the greatest sovereigns of the Continent on the subject of the slave trade. We have been repulsed--we have been deluded. But by whom have we been insulted? The representations of the King and people of England have never been met with outrageous scorn and anger,--except by the men who owe their food to our bounties, and their lives to our troops. To the most gentle and moderate advice, to the suggestions of the most respectable of the West Indian proprietors resident in England, they reply only in ravings of absurd slander, or impotent defiance. The essays in their newspapers, the speeches of their legislators, the resolutions of their vestries, are, almost without exception, mere collections of rancorous abuse, unmixed with argument. If the Antislavery Society would publish a small tract, containing simply the leading articles of five or six numbers of the Jamaica Gazette, without note or comment, they would, we believe, do more to illustrate the character of their adversaries than by any other means which can be devised. Such a collection would exhibit to the country the real nature of that malignant spirit which banished Salisbury, which destroyed Smith, and which broke the honest heart of Ramsay.

It is remarkable, that most of these zealots of slavery have little or no pecuniary interest in the question. If the colonies should be ruined, the loss will fall, not upon the book-keepers, the overseers, the herd of needy emigrants who make up the noisy circles of Jamaica; but upon the Ellises, the Hibberts, the Mannings, men of the most respectable characters and enlightened minds in the country. _They_ might have been excused, if any person could be excused, for employing violent and abusive language. Yet they have conducted themselves, not perhaps exactly as we might wish them, but still like gentlemen, like men of sense, like men of feeling. Why is this? Simply because they live in England, and participate in English feelings. The Colonists, on the other hand, are degraded by familiarity with oppression. Let us not be deceived. The cry which resounds from the West {321}Indies is raised by men, who are trembling less for their property than for the privileges of their caste. These are the persons who love slavery for its own sake. The declarations so often made by the Parliament, by the Ministers, by the deadliest enemies of slavery, that the interests of all parties will be fairly considered, and that wherever a just claim to compensation can be established, compensation will be given, bring no comfort to them. They may have no possessions, but they have white faces. Should compensation be given, few of them will receive a sixpence; but they will lose the power of oppressing with impunity every man who has a black skin. And it is to these men, who have scarcely any interest in the value of colonial property, but who have a deep interest,--the interest of a petty tyranny, and a despicable pride in the maintenance of colonial injustice, that the British Parliament is required to give up its unquestionable right of superintendence over every part of our empire. If this were requested as a matter of indulgence, or recommended as a matter of expediency, we might well be surprised. But it is demanded as a constitutional right. On what does this right rest? On what statute? On what charter? On what precedent? On what analogy? That the uniform practice of past ages has been against their claim, they themselves do not venture to deny. Do they mean to assert, that a parliament in which they are not represented ought not to legislate for them? That question we leave them to settle with their friends of the Quarterly Review and the John Bull newspaper, who, we hope, will enlighten them on the subject of virtual representation. If ever that expression could be justly used, it would be in the present case; for probably there is no interest more fully represented in both Houses of Parliament, than that of the colonial proprietors. But for ourselves we answer, What have you to do with such doctrines? If you will adopt the principles of liberty, adopt them altogether. Every argument which you can urge in support of your own claims, might be employed, with far greater justice, in favour of the emancipation of your bondsmen. When that event shall have taken place, your demand will deserve consideration. At present, what you require under the name of freedom is nothing but unlimited power to oppress. It is the freedom of Nero.

“But {322}we will rebel!” Who can refrain from thinking of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, who, while raised sixty feet from the ground on the hand of the King of Brohdignag, claps his hand on his sword and tells his Majesty that he knows how to defend himself? You will rebel! Bravely resolved, most magnanimous Grildrig! But remember the wise remark of Lord Beelington--“courage without power,” said that illustrious exile, “is like a consumptive running footman.” What are your means of resistance? Are there, in all the islands put together, ten thousand white men capable of hearing arms? Are not your forces, such as they are, divided into small portions which can never act in concert? But this is mere trifling. Are you, in point of fact, at this moment able to protect yourselves against your slaves without our assistance? If you can still rise up and be down in security--if you can still eat the bread of the fatherless, and grind the faces of the poor--if you can still hold your petty parliaments, and say your little speeches, and move, your little motions--if you can still outrage and insult the Parliament and people of England, to what do you owe it? To nothing but to our contemptuous mercy. If we suspend our protection--if we recall our troops--in a week the knife is at your throats!

Look to it, that we do not take you at your word. What are you to us that we should pamper and defend you? If the Atlantic Ocean should pass over you, and your place know you no more, what should we lose? Could we find no other cultivators to accept of our enormous bounties on sugar?--no other pestilential region to which we might send our soldiers to catch the yellow fever?--no other community for which we might pour forth our blood and lavish our money, to purchase nothing but injuries and insults? What do we make by you? If England is no longer to be the _mistress_ of her colonies,--if she is to be only the handmaid of their pleasures, or the accomplice of their crimes, she may at least venture to ask, as a handmaid, what are to be the wages of her service,--as an accomplice, what is to be her portion of the spoil? If justice, and mercy, and liberty, and the law of God, and the happiness of man, be words without a meaning, we at least talk to the purpose when we talk of pounds, shillings, and pence.

Let us count our gains. Let us bring to the test the lofty phrases {323}of Colonial declamation. The West Indies, we are told, are a source of vast wealth and revenue to the country. They are a nursery of seamen. They take great quantities of our manufactures. They add to our political importance. They are useful posts in time of war. These absurdities have been repeated, till they have begun to impose upon the impostors who invented them. Let us examine them briefly.

Our commercial connexion with the West Indies is simply this. We buy our sugar from them at a higher price than is given for it in any other part of the world. The surplus they export to the Continent, where the price is lower; and we pay them the difference out of our own pockets. Our trade with the West Indies is saddled with almost all the expense of their civil and military establishments, and with a bounty of 1,200,000l. Let these be deducted from the profits of which we hear so much, and their amount will shrink indeed. Let us then deduct from the residue the advantages which we relinquish in order to obtain it,--that is to say, the profits of a free sugar trade all over the world; and then we shall be able to estimate the boasted gains of a connexion to which we have sacrificed the Negroes in one hemisphere, and the Hindoos in the other.

But the West Indians take great quantities of our manufactures! They can take only a return for the commodities which they send us. And from whatever country we may import the same commodities, to that country must we send out the same returns. What is it that now limits the demands of our Eastern empire? Absolutely nothing but the want of an adequate return. From that immense market--from the custom of one hundred millions of consumers, our manufacturers are in a great measure excluded, by the protecting duties on East Indian sugar.

But a great revenue is derived from the West Indian trade! Here, again, we have the same fallacy. As long as the present quantity of sugar is imported into England, no matter from what country, the revenue will not suffer; and, in proportion as the price of sugar is diminished, the consumption, and, consequently, the revenue, must increase. But the West Indian trade affords extensive employment to British shipping and seamen! Why more than any equally extensive trade with any other part of the world? The more {324}active our trade, the more demand there will be for shipping and seamen; and every one who has learnt the alphabet of Political Economy, knows that trade is active, in proportion only as it is free.

There are some who assert that, in a military and political point of view, the West Indies are of great importance to this country. This is a common, but a monstrous misrepresentation. We venture to say, that Colonial empire has been one of the greatest curses of modern Europe. What nation has it ever strengthened? What nation has it ever enriched? What have been its fruits? Wars of frequent occurrence and immense cost, fettered trade, lavish expenditure, clashing jurisdiction, corruption in governments, and indigence among the people. What have Mexico and Peru done for Spain, the Brazils for Portugal, Batavia for Holland? Or, if the experience of others is lost upon us, shall we not profit by our own? What have we not sacrificed to our infatuated passion for transatlantic dominion? This it is that has so often led us to ri.-k our own smiling gardens and dear firesides for some snowy desert or infections morass on the other side of the globe: This inspired us with the project of conquering America in Germany: This induced us to resign all the advantages of our insular situation--to embroil ourselves in the intrigues, and fight the battles of half the Continent--to form coalitions which were instantly broken---and to give subsidies which were never earned: This gave birth to the fratricidal war against American liberty, with all its disgraceful defeats, and all its barren victories, and all the massacres of the Indian hatchet, and all the bloody contracts of the Hessian slaughterhouse: This it was which, in the war against the French republic, induced us to send thousands and tens of thousands of our bravest troops to die in West Indian hospitals, while the armies of our enemies were pouring over the Rhine and the Alps. When a colonial acquisition has been in prospect, we have thought no expenditure extravagant, no interference perilous. Gold has been to us as dust, and blood as water. Shall we never learn wisdom? Shall we never cease to prosecute a pursuit wilder than the wildest dream of alchemy, with all the credulity and all the profusion of Sir Epicure Mammon?

Those who maintain that settlements so remote conduce to the military or maritime power of nations, fly in the face of history. {325}The colonies of Spain were far more extensive and populous than ours. Has Spain, at any time within the last two centuries, been a match for England either by land or by sea? Fifty years ago, our colonial dominions in America were far larger and more prosperous than those which we at present possess. Have we since that time experienced any decay in our political influence, in our opulence, or in our security? Or shall we say that Virginia was a less valuable possession than Jamaica, or Massachusetts than Barbadoes?

The fact is, that all the evils of our Colonial system are immensely aggravated in the West Indies by the peculiar character of the state of slavery which exists there. Our other settlements we have to defend only against foreign invasion. These we must protect against the constant enmity of the miserable bondsmen, who are always waiting for the moment of deliverance, if not of revenge. With our other establishments we may establish commercial relations advantageous to both parties. But these are in a state of absolute pauperism; for what are bounties and forced prices but an enormous poor-rate in disguise?