“In Hayti, even at present, tinder the judicious government of President
Boyer, we find the free and intelligent American Blacks receiving land
for nothing, having their expenses paid, and the produce of the land to
be for their own advantage, obliged, by a legal act, to apply themselves
to a kind of labour which is manifestly and clearly intended to better
their condition.
“Why should a free man be thus obliged to act in a manner which the most
ignorant person might discover was a duty incumbent on him, and that
the result would be for his advantage? The legal act and its penalties,
after such a grant of land, would appear pre-eminently absurd in
England.” (2)
We, for our own parts, can conceive nothing more preeminently absurd,
than for a man to quote and comment on what he has never read. This is
clearly the case with the Major. The emigrants who were to be obliged
by a legal act to apply themselves to labour, were not those who were
to receive land for nothing, but those who were to rent it, or to hire
themselves out as labourers under others.. The Major has applied the
provisions of the Seventh Article to the class mentioned in the Sixth.
So disgraceful an instance of carelessness we never saw in any official
document.
Whether the President acted well or ill, is not the question. The
principle on which he proceeded cannot be mistaken. He was about to
advance a considerable sum for the purpose of transporting these people
to Hayti. He appears, as far as we can judge from these instructions, to
have exacted no security from the higher and most respectable class.
But he thought it probable, we suppose, that many of those idle
and profligate persons who abound in all great cities, and who are
peculiarly likely to abound in a degraded caste, beggars and thieves,
the refuse of the North American bridewells, might accept his proposals,
merely that they might live for some months at free costs, and
then return to their old habits. He therefore naturally required some
assurance that the poorer emigrants intended to support themselves by
their industry before he would agree to advance their subsistence.