But we have done, not because our materials are exhausted, · but because we have already swelled the work by our citations to an inconvenient size*. Last year Mr. Baring facetiously observed, that "what might be called our stock stories" were worn threadbare. He was tired to hear of nothing but Huggins and Carty, and Kitty and Thisbe: they were repeated in every speech and pamphlet, till they were fairly worn out, proving also the absence of any new facts of the same kind. The fresh importation, of which we have given a specimen, will prevent, in the next session of Parliament, the offence to good taste of which Mr. Baring so sensitively complains. His commerce connects him with Berbice, the scene of these atrocities; and yet Mr. Baring, with all his assumed knowledge of the subject, was as ignorant of these transactions as the child unborn; and would have been perfectly incredulous of them had they come, not from the fiscal of Berbice, himself a planter, but from some of those persons whom he unfairly and ungenerously represents as fabricating such stories in order to curry favour with their employers. He complains too of the assiduity with which petitions are got up on this subject. And does he suppose that such transactions as these, when they come to be known, will not rouse the public to petition? The people of Great Britain cannot remain unaffected by such enormities perpetrated on their helpless fellow-subjects; nor can they continue to tolerate those fiscal regulations by which they are made to pay, in bounties and protecting duties, for the cost of this bloody and murderous system.

One word more before we conclude our painful task. A work has just made its appearance, of considerable labour,

*We have given only a tithe of the atrocities brought before the fiscal of the small colony of Berbice, containing about 20,000 slaves! What a mass of horrors should we have had before us, could we have had a similar return from all our colonies, containing altogether upwards of forty times that number! Only three, however, of these colonies have fiscals, or any analogous officers, to record, in any manner, however imperfect, such transactions.

.

or

and considerable pretence to authority, containing 270 closely printed octavo pages, entitled, "Considerations submitted in Defence of the Orders in Council for the Melioration of Slavery in Trinidad, and upon the probable Effect of sudden Emancipation on agricultural Industry and British Capital in the West Indies, in a Series of Letters which appeared in the Star Newspaper under the Signature of Vindex. To which is annexed, the thirteenth Article in the sixteenth Number of the Quarterly Review; and the Observations thereon, in a series of Letters which appeared in the New Times Newspaper under the Signature of Anglus." It is printed for Murray, and is addressed" to those Members of both Houses of Parliament who, whatever may be their private interests, preconceived opinions, feel anxious for the elucidation of truth in the question of West-India Slavery." It is an elaborate, ingenious, and humane attempt to quiet the consciences of those gentlemen and their friends who having private interests involved in the question, are desirous of having a salvo against the agony of self-accusation, and a plausible excuse to the world for prolonging the existence of that foul and disgraceful system. But all will not do. The national conscience can no longer be lulled to sleep. Its powerful voice will be heard, and will sweep away all such refuges of lies as would seek to reconcile the toleration of such practices, either to the character of our country, or the paramount obligations of Christian duty.

The grand object of this bulky pamphlet is to prove to the British Parliament, that slavery in the West Indies is a better and more gainful condition of society than freedom. If this position were true, it would be an arraignment of the moral government of God. If it were as true as it is false, the people of England would revolt from the idea of pocketing the gains arising from such a hideous combination of injustice, cruelty, and crime. But it is as false as it is impious and inhuman.

The pamphlet to which we allude appears to have proceeded from the same arsenal which supplied the materials for Lord Bathurst's speech in March 1824; for the article on the

West Indies in the Quarterly Review; and for the comments on the case of the Donna Paula, (see above, p. 124). One of the grand arguments, indeed the argumentum palmarium of this school, has been drawn from a comparison of the island of Hayti with our own colonies. On this prop of their system, much of the present production has been made to rest. But, unfortunately for the author, it had vanished from under him before his pamphlet saw the light. The fact that the population of Hayti had grown, in about twenty years, from half a million to nearly a million, had already laid the axe to the root of his goodly argument; and the recognition of Haytian independence, and the price which Hayti has been able to pay for it, has swept away the very last vestige even of the rubbish that had been falling around him.

Ellerton and Henderson, Printers,
Gough Square, London.

THE END.