(_Edinburgh Review_, January 1825.)
I
Of {303}the numerous excellent works in which this important
subject has lately been discussed, that of Mr. Stephen is the most
comprehensive, and, in many respects, the most valuable. We are not
aware that any opponent has appeared, sufficiently intrepid to deny
his statements, or to dispute their results. The decent and cautious
advocates of slavery carefully avoid all allusion to a publication which
they feel to be unanswerable; and the boldest content themselves with
misrepresenting and reviling what they cannot even pretend to confute.
In truth, it is not too much to assert that, on the part of the
slave-drivers and their supporters, this controversy has, for the most
part, been conducted with a disingenuousness and a bitterness to which
literary history furnishes no parallel. Most of the honourable and
intelligent men whose names give respectability to the Colonial party,
have, in prudence or in disgust, stood aloof from the contest. In their
absence, the warfare has been carried on by a race of scribblers, who,
like the mercenary Mohawks, so often our auxiliaries in Transatlantic
campaigns, unite the indifference of the hireling to the ferocity of the
cannibal; who take aim from an ambush, and who desire victory only that
they may have the pleasure of scalping and torturing the vanquished.
(1) _The Slavery of the British West India Colonies
delineated, as it exists both in Law and Practice, and
compared with the Slavery of other Counties, Ancient and
Modern_. By James Stephen, Esq. Vol. I, being a Delineation
of the State in point of Law. London, Butterworth, 1824.
The friends of humanity and freedom have often boasted, with {304}honest
pride, that the wise and good of hostile sects and factions seemed, when
slavery or the slave-trade were in question, to forget their mutual
antipathies:--that the introduction of this subject was to such men what
the proclamation of a Crusade was to the warriors of the dark ages--a
signal to suspend all their petty disputes, and to array themselves
under the same holy banner, against the same accursed enemy. In this
respect the slave-drivers are now even with us. They, too, may boast
that, if our cause has received support from honest men of all religious
and political parties, theirs has tended, in as great a degree, to
combine and conciliate every form of violence and illiberality. Tories
and Radicals, prebendaries and field-preachers, are to be found in their
ranks. The only requisites for one who aspires to enlist, are a front of
brass and a tongue of venom.
“Omnigenumque Deum monstra, et latrator Anubis,