APPENDIX. THE WEST INDIES.1 (Edinburgh Review, January 1825.) Or 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 aasion 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. 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. In The friends of humanity and freedom have often boasted, 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 Countries, Ancient and Modern. By JAMES STEPHEN, Esq. Vol. I., being a Delineation of the State in point of Law. London, Butterworth, 1824. APPENDIX. THE WEST INDIES.1 (Edinburgh Review, January 1825.) Or 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 aš asion 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. 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. In The friends of humanity and freedom have often boasted, 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 Countries, Ancient and Modern. By JAMES STEPHEN, Esq. Vol. I., being a Delineation of the State in point of Law. Loudon, Butterworth, 1824. |