claim to our common nature was denied or doubted, and the unbroken prejudice of white ascendency overrode the whole belt of the tropics--the efficacy of the scourge and of the coupling fetter might, with some probable safety, be trusted. Yet, even through that apparent security, the efforts of the amis des Noirs were able to reach and to rouse the negroes of St. Domingo; and the colonial power of France was docked, at a blow, of its mightiest limb. If such a revolution was possible to the slaves of St. Domingo then, how little security can there be against the slaves of Brazil or Cuba now! The great commonwealth of the West Indies, whose universal anxiety was heretofore for the supremacy of the master, will now give all their sympathies to the slave. The liberated negro of Jamaica will be the ready partisan of the insurgent at Pernambuco or Guadaloupe; and the English planter, struggling for a livelihood by free labour, will see with complacency the disquiets which embarrass his slave-owning rival at the Havannah. In every quarter, the movements of emancipation will be flanked and reinforced by neighbours joining all their voices, hearts, and hands, for the slave, against the master. This, too, will be a friendship, available not only to forward victory, but to cover defeat. It will furnish not only munitions and encouragements for warfare, but retreat and shelter for discomfiture: for the slave who flies to an English colony will be wholly free. Let the foreign planter increase, as he will, the numbers or the restraints of his slaves, he does but aggravate their motives to insurrection, or tempt them to these means of flight. Such are the dangers of the foreign settlements, even while the parent states are at peace. If any such state should go to war, each colony belonging to it would be vulnerable at every point. The landing of a regiment, with a few thousand spare muskets, would complete the conquest of any one of those settlements in a day. Meanwhile, the merchantmen of every state in Europe are suffering heavily from the slave-traders; for the authorities now before us leave no doubt that a large proportion of them are common pirates, in the familiar sense of that word-common robbers of all merchant-ships frequenting the West Indian seas. These are the leading topics of selfish interest, which we think our Cabinet may usefully enforce upon the slave-holding governments; but much may likewise be expected from that constant, zealous, vigorous perseverance of humane individuals, which, more than all other causes put together, contributed, in the British dominions, to the abolition, first of the slave-trade, and then of the state of slavery itself. What has been achieved in Great Britain, against powerful and wealthy opposition, will be tried, not in vain, among the other interested powers. Education and intelli gence gence may not yet have extended themselves abroad, to a class so numerous as that to which these advantages have been opened in our own land; but neither on the continent of Europe, nor in the Northern States of America, are the understandings and feelings of society insensible to the principles of justice and freedom, and to the genuine and common interests of their own country and of mankind. 'If they are ignorant,' says Dr. Walsh, even of the Brazilians, it is not from any want of a desire for knowledge, or a disposition to learn. When the post arrives at S. José, or a similar place, the office is crowded with people, who come for their newspapers, and others who press forward, eager to know what they contain; and every provincial town has now a newspaper of its own. In Lenheiros they have established a respectable public library, with a literary society; and schools of primary instruction are opened, whereever there is a collection of houses to supply scholars; who are so eager to learn, that, in some places, for want of books, they are instructed out of manuscripts; and along the roads, the humblest people were glad to receive, and ready to give, any useful information.' -vol. ii. p. 292. Such accounts are not a little encouraging to those who place their hopes of good upon the influence of a well-directed press, and the consequent progress of public intelligence. With such prospects expanded before us, we have encouragement to believe that even our distant labours are not in vain. The disposition to read and reflect being once awakened, literature, and, above all, periodical literature, is a direct and powerful agent, and gathers and puts forth fresh energy from the pride of usefulness. A path is laid through the desert, and a bridge over the waters. With the mind, the heart too opens-and knowledge becomes the harbinger of charity. Coming now to the practical point-we say distinctly, that if the maritime powers mean any thing of what they profess-nay, if they have even foresight sufficient to discern the storm which the progress of slavery is gathering over their colonial possessionsthey will and must concur in that one remedy, which, wherever it has been fairly tried, has fulfilled its purpose, the simple measure of declaring the slave-trader a pirate. England has enacted it as to her own subjects; and the consequence is, that no English master* is found any longer in this deadly adventure. For the penalty of piracy is death; which penalty England has actually executed; and the master, who makes no account of a few scores of African lives for each voyage, is found to have the tenderest Mr. Innes has some melancholy statements which forbid our asserting that no English capital is at this moment engaged in the Slave-trade. See his interesting Letter to Lord Glenelg,—p. 105. consideration 1 consideration for his own. A somewhat similar policy has been adopted by the Legislature at Washington; and accordingly, of the large supplies of Africans, imported through the Texas into the southern states of that Union, few, if any, are found to enter the Gulf of Mexico in American ships. Even Brazil, the greatest receiver of slaves, having made it piracy for her ships to bring them from Africa, exhibits hardly any vessels of her own in that trade. Why, then, there at last is the plenary remedy; the states of the Christian world have it in their own hands. That traffic which is now declared piracy by and against the municipal laws of England, of the United States, and of Brazil, must be declared piracy by and against the general law of all nations, and visitable by the commissioned ships of any. The indispensable necessity of such a declaration of piracy has been urged upon the French government recently, and, we believe, with impression, by Mr. Irving: to whose former exertions also, under an authority from Lord Palmerston, the cause of humanity is indebted for the mutual right of search, and some other steps gained in the existing treaty with France. The national immunity of the slaver must cease. Be it the French, the Spanish, or the Portuguese, the Brazilian or the American flag, which he dishonours by his use of it, he is the enemy of every government and people, and must bear his charmed life' no longer. How is he less a robber, because the spoil he has filched, unlike the senseless' bale or ingot which are the booty of braver pirates, is a living prey, that can think and suffer? As with the principal offender, so should it be likewise with his accomplices. The British Commissioner at the Havannah observes,* "That the owner of the vessel, who gets up the expedition, apportions the shares, and before the vessel sails regularly becomes re-i sponsible for her to the custom-house, by a public deed, never suffers beyond the casual loss of a vessel condemned by the mixed commission.' This is too much. That the contriver of the guilty adventure shall thus lay his own base person high and dry upon the shore, and luxuriate in the safe profits of his crime, is a reproach that might go near to sting the public conscience even in Cuba. But, let powers be conferred by treaty, upon the court before which any captured pirate shall be tried, to take depositions respecting the vessel's ownership and outfit; let those depositions, with othe witnesses, be transmitted to a criminal court of mixed commission, of which one tribunal, or sitting, should be established at some convenient point of the tropics, not being a slave colony, } *Parliamentary Papers, presented 1830, A. 118. -and -and another in the south of Europe and let the contracting states be mutually bound, upon process issued from such tribunal, against any implicated party within their respective dominion, to deliver him up into its custody for the purpose of trial as an accessory before the fact ;-in other words, let the nations but agree to set up, by international law, against the wholesale thefts and murders of the slave-trade, the same sort of criminal jurisdiction which the municipal law of every single state among them establishes against robbery within its own respective limits,and a year will not elape before this pollution will be dried to its very source. The transmission of the accused and of the witnesses will, no doubt, occasion some expense; but an expense absolutely trifling in comparison of the costly armaments which are now maintained to cruise ineffectually off the African coast. These are the means which the Christian nations of the world possess, by general union, to terminate the traffic of which they all profess their horror. But England has placed herself in circumstances which require from her, in addition to her general cooperation with the other powers, that she shall take especial precautions of her own to prevent the establishment of an aggravated foreign slavery, in the room of her freed labour.. We must briefly touch upon the causes and character of this danger, and upon those means by which it may be practicable to avert it. I We have already had occasion to observe how largely the slavemarket has, of late years, thriven, under the expectation of the foreign planters, that the relaxation and discontinuance of slavelabour in the British colonies must be followed by a diminution of British production, and by a consequently increased vent for the produce of the foreign plantations. These expectations (on the strength whereof we understand that the prices of slaves in Puerto Rico and the southern United States have already risen between 25 and 30 per cent.) have proceeded upon the very great difference between the cost of producing sugar by free and by slave labour. In some parts of Guiana, St. Vincent's, Trinidad, Mauritius, and Jamaica, the prime cost may probably be low enough, by reason of the soil's fertility, the facilities of carriage, and other local advantages, to promise a continuance of the sugar-crops (notwithstanding the additional cost of free labour), at a price not too high to find some purchasers; but on all the secondary class of estates, the cost of production, under the added disadvantage of free labour, must henceforth (unless relief can be given in some essential point, such as that of the restrictions on West Indian intercourse) be too heavy to be remunerated at any price which, under the present duty, the consumers could permanently pay. Nay, even granting the fullest relief from restrictions, and admitting that, in general, the planter may be able to procure free labour labour provided he give a liberal price for it, we cannot shut our eyes to the certainty that there are very many plantations which are too little productive to afford, at best, any thing like a freelabour price, and which, in any conceivable circumstances, must absolutely be abandoned; in fact, we can hardly calculate this abandonment at a proportion so low as one-sixth of the whole; which would exhibit a discontinuance of production, to the extent of 38,500 tons of the 231,000 now raised, being more than the whole quantity of West Indian sugar consumed in the markets of the European continent. On this subject we invite particular attention to the simple matter-of-fact statements of Mr. Innes in his Letter to Lord Glenelg-passim. * The first consequence, then, of the recent abolition of compulsory labour in our West Indies and the Mauritius will be, and indeed already is, that so much of the continental sugar-market as those colonies were wont to supply must be furnished from the cheaper labour of the foreign slave-plantations; and of those supplies to the continent so failing from the British colonies the annual amount is, we repeat, from thirty-five to forty thousand tons. To this full extent, at all events, and under any possible remissions, we must prepare to see substituted, for the comparatively mild servitude of the British colonies, the oppressive slavery of the foreign settlements, fed by the African traffic; for East Indian sugar being, as official evidence has shown, by much too costly to compete on the continent with the slave-grown produce of the foreign settlements, the case, as far as concerns the continental supply, seems wholly incapable of remedy. Still, while we pretend not to deny that the English measure of emancipation is attended with the disadvantage of making room for a great deal of slavegrown sugar, on the continent, let us not be understood as thence inferring any blame to our country. At worst, she may have been a little too precipitate in a right course. Her first duty was felt to be her own reformation; and if that reformation has left a wider scope for the covetousness and cruelty of her neighbours, England, however she may lament the misfortune, at least does not share in the crime. * The statements of the importation and consumption of sugar at the date of the Emancipation Act, may be thus dissected: Consumed in Re-exported to Continent of Europe, 34,000 171,000 |