AT the Annual Meeting of your Society, that has just been held, one of
the most crowded you have ever convened, the able and eloquent advocate
of free trade, George Thompson, succeeded in carrying an amendment,
notwithstanding the avowed opposition of your officers and Committee; an
amendment of the most essential importance, pledging you to the
consideration of a subject that threatens to impair the usefulness, and
to imperil the very existence of the Society you support. As a sincere
well-wisher to that Society, as one eager with yourselves for the
abolition of slavery throughout the world, the writer of the following
pages beseeches you to peruse them in the spirit of anxious solicitude
with which they were penned.
You must be aware, by the course you are pursuing, you are losing the
sympathies of the popular mind. If you heed not what you are about, the
results of last Friday’s vote will materially impair your strength. You
are already quoted by men who have no interests in common with the
people; you are an authority in the mouths of Conservative statesmen: the
advocates of monopoly, and bloodshed, and death, for the former implies
the latter, tell us you sanction their proceedings, and smile
complacently on their resort to measures that can only derive efficacy
from the fact, that they are backed by the soldier’s sword. Religious
and peaceable men, as you are, with full faith, believing what reason and
revelation alike teach, that truth—mere truth—simple and alone, is
stronger than the iron arm of might, succumbs to no power, in heaven
above, or on the earth beneath, how can you, how dare you, give the lie
to the principles you profess, and ask the aid of government, which is
based alone upon physical force? Think you, by the bayonet and ball, to
ennoble your noble cause? Know you so little of earth’s history, as for
one moment to suppose that wrong ever became right, or that by the
employment of means which error has used with success, you can obtain
even the shadow of a gain for the sacred cause of truth?
Sir Robert Peel, the forlorn hope of rulers who have come into the world
a century too late, and who obstinately continue to oppose the advancing
stream, by which they will assuredly be swept away, has done you the
questionable honour of alluding to you, as on his side, in opposition to
the people’s friends. How he abhors slavery, he has shown in the
reduction he has announced in the duties on coffee, which employs
three-fourths of the slaves in Brazil. Will this be no stimulus to
slavery there? Or is the slave only the subject of your deep concern,
when he is employed in the cultivation of sugar? The editors of the
“Anti-Slavery Reporter” complain of being misrepresented, and blame Mr.
Cobden for blaming them, as if they approved of the government scheme.
But unfortunately you and the government have entered into
partnership—Sir Robert Peel helps you, and you help him. It is the firm
we find fault with. One member may not exactly approve of every thing
his partner does, but he must bear it as best he can. We learn “from the
ordinary channels of information,” as “they say in another place,” that
Mr. Barber is very indignant at the idea of being made a sharer in the
guilt of Mr. Fletcher, and his amiable accomplice, in the forgery of
wills. We doubt not but that your Committee can quite sympathise in Mr.
Barber’s righteous indignation. If they wished to avoid the charge of
hypocrisy, which may be fairly brought against the West Indian monopoly
party in the House of Commons, they should have acted as Mr. Barber must
wish he had acted—they should have refused to be made the tools of any
man, or set of men.
This has not been done. The odium that attaches to the government is
yours. The slave-holder would, ere now, have been driven from the
market—he would have stood before the world blasted in character and
worth, had you never descended from the high ground on which it is given
the advocate of truth to stand—had you never pandered to political
factions—had you never given to party “what was meant for mankind.” The
Tory press have come to your aid; and if you have the least regard for
the great cause of which you are the pledged supporters, you will scorn
the envenomed slanderers who supply what they need in reasoning, by the
most vulgar and disgusting abuse. {6} It would be well, too, if some of
your own Committee who are connected with the public press, would pause
ere they impute incompetency to consider the question to those who gave
the verdict last Friday, at Exeter Hall. That they were beaten is no
argument whatever why they should insult those who differed in opinion
from themselves. The Editor of the _Patriot_ thought otherwise, else why
were we told the question was too abstruse for us to settle? Are we to
wait till his powerful intellect has made it clear? Does he not know
that while the Committee were continuing in the old routine, the public
mind had arrived at an opposite decision? Men have learned at last that
slavery can only be destroyed by freedom; that given, the right to buy in
the cheapest market and sell in the dearest—and the employer of free men
will soon be left alone in the field.
With these few remarks, gentlemen, the writer would commend the Thoughts
on Slavery and Cheap Sugar to your most attentive perusal. The subject
is of no common importance. If you are wrong, you are altogether wrong,
and are a curse instead of a blessing—a curse to the slaves abroad—a
curse to the negro on the coast of Africa, who is now murdered when he
was before sold as a slave, and whom we would civilise and christianise
by transporting to the untilled fields of Jamaica {7}—a curse to the
labourer at home, whose wretched existence you help to render more
wretched still. Well may you shudder as you think of the responsibility
you incur. Consider well your present course—momentous interests are at
stake. Let your decision be calm and unprejudiced—not given in deference
to well-meaning and respectable men—not from any uneasy sensation of
annoyance or ill-will, but such as will be in accordance with the light
you have. Your cause is a popular one, and you must be in a false
position when you find yourselves opposed to the popular will. This one
fact of itself ought to excite suspicion. Advocating as you do the
rights and dignity of man, you and the creatures and champions of a
fictitious aristocracy can have no common ground, and can never be found
on a common side. To be amongst such men at all, you must have drifted
from your moorings. Look well to it that you rectify this error in time.
One word about the pamphlet. It is written with no reference whatever to
the government scheme. It is hardly worth while to attack a measure
which surely your Committee will not defend—a measure which will merely
drive slave-grown sugar from one market to another—a measure which opens
the door abundantly to fraud, and to those immoralities with which fraud
is always accompanied. The writer’s object has been to show that our
past mode of procedure has not destroyed slavery;—that the adopting the
principles of free-trade alone can do this; and that such a course would
be a great national boon. All he aims at is the truth; and he should be
happy to stand corrected when in the wrong.
That you, gentlemen, may calmly and seriously consider the momentous
question discussed in these pages, and that the valuable Society, which
has so many claims on your regard, may continue to exist and act with
increasing power, till slavery be abolished, is the sincere wish and
prayer of