slaves-their women have always been loaded with the severest toils of their husbandry, such as it is, and has been -their intellect has stood still for many thousand years; and has, up to this moment, done absolutely NOTHING their superstitions are the most foul-their whole ideas are the most degraded their manners are the most brutal-their enjoyments the most base of which human nature has ever furnished any specimen. And now mark this:-Throughout by far the greater part of these horrible ages, they have not been meddled with, in any shape whatever, on their own soil, by people of any other race but their own. Their degradation has been their own; and in spite of all that can be said about the interference of modern Europeans, that degradation is at this moment their own handywork. All that has been done from without, is as a drop in the bucket to that ocean of crime and brutality into which their own base and uncontrolled passions have poured their eternal reservoirs of voluntary evil.

It is very painful to make, and it cannot be pleasing to listen to, such statements; but how avoid them? seeing, as we do, that it is the uniform cant of the persons we have to deal with, to talk and write about the negroes, as if they really were upon a level in all things but good luck with every other part of the great family to which they unquestionably belongas if their degraded condition were entirely the work of whites-as if, but for us, they were, and would be, capable of just the same actions, animated with just the same feelings, and in possession of just the same advantages, as ourselves.-This is one of the great primary blunders with which their talk, non vi (God knows!) sed sape cadendo, is making people so familiar, that they lose the power of analysing and detecting them. Look at the whole Buxton debate. There is not, throughout the whole of it, one single allusion to what the negroes were ere any European meddled with themor, which was indeed the necessary consequence of that omission, to what it really is of which a negro can be deprived by being made a European's bondsman.

This is one of the great preliminary blunders which a plausible set of nar

row-minded imbeciles, and a far more despicable knot of cunning mercantile speculators, have been eternally upholding. The former, we dare say, have become so accustomed to the chime, that they will scarcely trust their ears when they hear the idle melody checked by another note. But there is another blunder, perhaps still more contemptible, of which we must also say a word or two, ere we proceed to the real business before us.

It is assumed, then, that he who is a slave, is necessarily and uniformly placed in a more unhappy condition than he could possibly be placed in were he not a slave. We have already seen what an African negro loses when he becomes a slave. We have seen how closely his feelings, under that change, may be supposed to resemble those of AN ENGLISH GENTLEMAN subjected to Dahomy or Calabar bondage. But lay aside, for a moment, the actual change. Take the negro as he now exists in the West Indies, and compare him, not with the negro as he exists in Ashantee, but with the labouring peasant as he exists in England or in Scotland-in the most happy of all European countries-under the most benign of all human governments-and see what is the real state of the case

see what the circumstances really are in which the actual conditions of these two human beings differ. In spite of " the African Prince," of Clarkson, and the Edinburgh Review, we suppose the comparison will scarcely be objected to as ex facie unfair, by the friends of the negroes.

We are not about to speak just at present of the blessings of religious instruction and moral feeling, and the enjoyments of civil privileges. Negroes have never been robbed of anything that can deserve to be talked of, seriously, we mean, under any of these heads, by Europeans. We are about to speak of the labouring peasant strictly as such-of his physical state-of his comforts and means, strictly personal and domestic.

The friends of East Indian sugar always set out with the gross hardship of labouring, without being paid for labour. The negro, say they, gets no wages from his master; and therefore he is below all other human beings.

Now, it is very true, that the negro gets no shilling or fifteenpence a-day paid him every Saturday evening by

has it in his power to make money; but what avails this, since he has not the legal power of bequest?

This is one of the topics that have been most unrelentingly dwelt upon; and in the strict letter of the law, the thing is as they say. But what then? is once more our answer. Practically, the slaves are universally permitted to leave not only money, but houses and lands, to whomsoever they please. This is the custom, the practice, the universal practice. And, accordingly, amidst all this mass of Pamphlets, Reports, Appeals, Views, Considerations, is there ONE instance produced of the peculium of a negro being seized by his master, or of his bequests being in any manner, or form, or degree whatever, interfered with?-No. No such fact is stated. If it could have been stated, sure enough may we be, it would have been so.

We admit, however, that that which does take place by custom and practice, ought to be made capable of taking place by law. Mr Canning proposed that every negro who had entered into the state of marriage, should be allowed, by law, to execute a legal will; and we have already said, that this appeared to us to be a very beautiful idea. As it is, there is no hardship practically felt by the negro as to this matter; and the White clamour about it has therefore been cant, and nothing but cant.

But, thirdly, say they :-The negro is subjected to corporal punishment; and "he is, or, at least, may be, branded on the flesh," like a horse or sheep. Now, as to the branding, no person born in the West Indies can be so dealt with: that is the law. Since the slave trade has been put an end to, this, therefore, has altogether ceased: and it must be recalled by these pamphleteers now, either from gross ignorance of what they pretend to have spent their lives in studying, or from a wilful and deliberate determination to excite popular feelings, cost what it may on the score of truth. So much for the branding. As for the corporal punishment, it has been already virtually abolished, in regard to women altogether; and it is not practised with severity, in regard to the men. Compared with the corporal punishments inflicted in our own army and navy, the thing is as nothing. No negro man is whipped to the breaking of the skin,

unless in very extraordinary cases of guilt, or by an accident which his master regrets. When Lord Bathurst wrote out to Jamaica some years ago, about mutilation of negroes, the only feelings excited in the minds of the West Indian planters, were wonder and indignation ;-indignation against the most brazen calumniators who had dared to insinuate such atrocities, and wonder that Lord Bathurst should have been so green as to put any faith in such stories from such men. the negro is compelled to labour-this is the taunt which nothing can prevent from being repeated. He is compelled. Yes, but why? Because he will not labour otherwise. This is the fact -this is the result of actual and extensive experience. Hear Mr Barham.

But

"A few negroes under peculiar circumstances, may have laboured for hire, but the evidence of all the colonies in the West Indies (in some of which there are abundance of free negroes, and abundance of people who would gladly hire them) proves, that, constituted as he now is, the negro will not work but under coercion. Hayti proves it-Africa proves it."

The Edinburgh Reviewer dwells most vehemently on Hayti. Hear what follows.

“The cultivation of Hayti seems to be now confined to the raising of provisions, which requires very little labour, and to the gathering of coffee and cotton from the trees already planted. As to Africa, even though in one particular part there should be a class of men, who will undertake temporary jobs for hire, and even though there may be some symptoms of voluntary labour at Sierra Leone, produced by moral improvement, yet such exceptions destroy not the general evidence of that vast continent. Indeed, the latter case rather confirms our statement. It is far from our meaning, that, by moral improvement, any change may not be effected; what we mean to say, is, that till such improvement shall have taken place, the negro will only work by coercion. A curious proof of this will be found in Mr John Hay's Narrative of the Grenada Insurrection, published by Ridgway, page 106. This gentleman was some time detained at Guadaloupe, then under the government of Victor Hugues. Punishment by the whip had been then totally abolished; but, instead of it, a military tribunal had been established, consisting of five whites and blacks, who made a tour of the island once a month, in order to try and punish such negroes as had neglected their work. They were condemned to be chained by the middle and ancle for five to fif

teen years. The more refractory were shot, which very frequently happened. Mr Hay relates this incidentally, and not for the purpose of founding any argument upon it.

"But, indeed, we hardly need to appeal to experience for the proof. By the clearest conclusions from facts that cannot be disputed, we may assure ourselves, a priori, that it must be so. The labour of a few days, builds as good a habitation as the negro desires; and the labour of a few more, supplies him with food for the year. Clothing he hardly wants, and artificial desires he has none so strong as the desire to pass his time in idleness. By what then but force can he be brought to work? We must here call, with the Greek mathematician, for ground to stand on. Ground there is none; and we might as soon expect to put a machine in motion by a power, which should be weaker than the power that resists, as we might expect the free negro to labour for hire, till some adequate want shall impel him. To teach him artificial wants, must be a work of time and uncertainty; and the case is hopeless, unless we can bring him under the same impulse which acts on the free labourer everywhere else. All the world over, this is neither more nor less than the want of food; and if the negro is to work, that stimulus must be applied to him, or he must remain under the whip; for, as to confinement or disgrace, he would hardly feel them as a punishment.

"Such are not the most pleasing views of human condition, but we must not shut our eyes to them, unless we would grossly deceive ourselves. The slave probably would prefer his present state under the whip, to that into which we would thus lead him; and, no doubt, that physically he suffers less in his present state, than he would then do at first; but the process is unavoidable; and if you would convert him into a free labourer, there is no other way to teach him.

"But how may the thing be effected? Half an acre is sufficient for his cottage and his food; the kind of land he wants is of little value, and is divided amongst proprietors so numerous as to render a combination impossible. Sooner than let their land lie waste, these proprietors would underbid each other, and the negro would thus obtain what land he wants, at a rent which the labour of a week, perhaps, would procure him. Another week would serve for its cultivation, and the remaining fifty weeks he would remain idle. It does not seem that any law could reach this case; nor could it be prevented, unless all the land were in one proprietor."

The truth is, that no man labours without the application of some stimulus; and the negro, the laziest of all men, is the least likely to do so. Cor

poral punishment, no doubt of that, is a disgusting thing, and we should most certainly rejoice in seeing it altogether banished, (unless in terrible cases indeed,) both from the West Indian plantations, and from the British army, and the British navy. An external stimulus of some sort, however, is necessary, when there is none sufficient within. The lazy soldier cleans his musket, because, if he does not, he will be whipped;-the lazy negro works in the sugar field for the same reason. The poor labourer at home, however lazily inclined, works, because, if he does not, he and his family must starve. This last, we are pretty sure, is not the feeblest, nor the least painful of these engines. Starving is worse than the scourge, and the fear of wife and children starving is worse than a thousand scourges. Let the soldier and the negro be tried with the stimulus of the labouring peasant, and see how either of them will relish the change. Ay, and whether it please them or not, let them be kept to it.

A fourth point of clamour is thus stated by the Mitigation Society, in their preface, (p. 14.)-" In the season of crop, which lasts for four or five months of the year, their labour is protracted, not only throughout the day, as at other times, but during either half the night, or the whole of every alternate night." Now, what is the truth? It is this:-On all estates that skill-that is to say, on all estates, but are managed with any sort of care and an infinitesimally small proportion, the negroes make their "spells," as they are called, so that the turn for night work comes round only twice a week for each "spell." This is the fact. It is also a fact pretty well known, that soldiers have such things as night-watches or guards all the year over: and it is a fact of which no man that has ever made one voyage in a king's ship can be ignorant, that no sailor ever can sleep more than four hours at a time. Another fact most certain and indisputable, is, that be the hardship of the crop season what it may, all negroes whatever are found to be fatter and better at the end of it, than at its beginning. Let them make of this what they please-deny it they cannot. Nor can it be denied, that if all the negroes were made freemen to-morrow, they would still-that is, if they were to continue as labourers in the cultiva