West Indies is raised by men, who are trembling less for their property than for the privileges of their caste. These are the persons who love slavery for its own sake. The declarations so often made by the Parliament, by the Ministers, by the deadliest enemies of slavery, that the interests of all parties will be fairly considered, and that wherever a just claim to compensation can be established, compensation will be given, bring no comfort to them. They may have no possessions, but they have white faces. Should compensation be given, few of them will receive a sixpence; but they will lose the power of oppressing with impunity every man who has a black skin. And it is to these men, who have scarcely any interest in the value of colonial property, but who have a deep interest, the interest of a petty tyranny, and a despicable pride in the maintenance of colonial injustice, that the British Parliament is required to give up its unquestionable right of superintendence over every part of our empire. If this were requested as a matter of indul gence, or recommended as a matter of expediency, we might well be surprised. But it is demanded as a constitutional right. On what does this right rest? On what statute? On what charter? On what precedent? On what analogy? That the uniform practice of past ages has been against their claim, they themselves do not venture to deny. Do they mean to assert, that a parliament in which they are not represented ought not to legislate for them? That question we leave them to settle with their friends of the Quarterly Review and the John Bull newspaper, who, we hope, will enlighten them on the subject of virtual representation. If ever that expression could be justly used, it would be in the present case; for probably there is no interest more fully represented in both Houses of Parliament, than that of the colonial proprietors. But for ourselves we answer, What have you to do with such doctrines? If you will adopt the principles of liberty, adopt them altogether. Every argument which you can urge in support of your own claims, might be employed, with far greater justice, in favour of the emancipation of your bondsmen. When that event shall bave taken place, your demand will deserve consideration. At present, what you require under the name of freedom is othing but unlimited power to oppress. It is the freedom of Nero.

But we will rebel!" Who can refrain from thinking of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, who, while raised sixty feet from the ground on the hand of the King of Brobdignag, claps his hand on his sword and tells his Majesty that he knows how to defend himself? You will rebel! Bravely resolved, most magnanimous Grildrig! But remember the wise remark of Lord Beefington "courage without power," said that illustrious exile, "is like a consumptive running footman." What are your means of resistance? Are there, in all the islands put together, ten thousand white men capable of bearing arms? Are not your forces, such as they are, divided into small portions which can never act in concert? But this is mere trifling. Are you, in point of fact, at this moment able to protect yourselves against your slaves without our assistance? If you can still rise up and lie down in security if you can still eat the bread of the fatherless, and grind the faces of the poor-if you can still hold your petty parliaments, and say your little speeches, and move your little motions if you can still outrage and insult the Parliament and people of England, to what do you owe it? To nothing but to our contemptuous mercy. If we suspend our protection if we recall our troops- in a week the knife is at your throats!

What

Look to it, that we do not take you at your word. are you to us that we should pamper and defend you? If the Atlantic Ocean should pass over you, and your place know you no more, what should we lose? Could we find no other cultivators to accept of our enormous bounties on sugar?-no other pestilential region to which we might send our soldiers to catch the yellow fever?- no other community for which we might pour forth our blood and lavish our money, to purchase nothing but injuries and insults? What do we make by you? If England is no longer to be the mistress of her colonies, if she is to be only the handmaid of their pleasures, or the accomplice of their crimes, she may at least venture to ask, as a handmaid, what are to be the wages of her service, as an accomplice, what is to be her portion of the spoil? If justice, and mercy, and liberty, and the law of God, and the happiness of man, be words without a meaning, we at least talk to the purpose when we talk of pounds, shillings, and pence.

Let us count our gains. Let us bring to the test the lofty

phrases of Colonial declamation. The West Indies, we are told, are a source of vast wealth and revenue to the country. They are a nursery of seamen. They take great quantities of our manufactures. They add to our political importance. They are useful posts in time of war. These absurdities have been repeated, till they have begun to impose upon the impostors who invented them. Let us examine them briefly.

Our commercial connexion with the West Indies is simply this. We buy our sugar from them at a higher price than is given for it in any other part of the world. The surplus they export to the Continent, where the price is lower; and we pay them the difference out of our own pockets. Our trade with the West Indies is saddled with almost all the expense of their civil and military establishments, and with a bounty of 1,200,000l. Let these be deducted from the profits of which we hear so much, and their amount will shrink indeed. Let us then deduct from the residue the advantages which we relinquish in order to obtain it, that is to say, the profits of a free sugar trade all over the world; and then we shall be able to estimate the boasted gains of a connexion to which we have sacrificed the Negroes in one hemisphere, and the Hindoos in the other.

But the West Indians take great quantities of our manufactures! They can take only a return for the commodities which they send us. And from whatever country we may import the same commodities, to that country must we send out the same returns. What is it that now limits the demands of our Eastern empire? Absolutely nothing but the want of an adequate return. From that immense marketfrom the custom of one hundred millions of consumers, our manufacturers are in a great measure excluded, by the protecting duties on East Indian sugar.

But a great revenue is derived from the West Indian trade! Here, again, we have the same fallacy. As long as the present quantity of sugar is imported into England, no matter from what country, the revenue will not suffer; and, in proportion as the price of sugar is diminished, the consumption, and, consequently, the revenue, must increase. But the West Indian trade affords extensive employment to British shipping and seamen! Why more than any equally extensive trade with any other part of the world? The

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more active our trade, the more demand there will be for shipping and seamen; and every one who has learnt the alphabet of Political Economy, knows that trade is active, in proportion only as it is free.

There are some who assert that, in a military and political point of view, the West Indies are of great importance to this country. This is a common, but a monstrous misrepresen tation. We venture to say, that Colonial empire has been one of the greatest curses of modern Europe. What nation has it ever strengthened? What nation has it ever enriched? What have been its fruits? Wars of frequent occurrence and immense cost, fettered trade, lavish expenditure, clashing jurisdiction, corruption in governments, and indigence among the people. What have Mexico and Peru done for Spain, the Brazils for Portugal, Batavia for Holland? Or, if the experience of others is lost upon us, shall we not profit by our own? What have we not sacrificed to our infatuated passion for transatlantic dominion? This it is that has so often led us to risk our own smiling gardens and dear firesides for some snowy desert or infectious morass on the other side of the globe: This inspired us with the project of con quering America in Germany: This induced us to resign all the advantages of our insular situation to embroil ourselves in the intrigues, and fight the battles of half the Continent to form coalitions which were instantly broken — and to give subsidies which were never earned: This gave birth to the fratricidal war against American liberty, with all its disgraceful defeats, and all its barren victories, and all the massacres of the Indian hatchet, and all the bloody contracts of the Hessian slaughterhouse: This it was which, in the war against the French republic, induced us to send thousands and tens of thousands of our bravest troops to die in West Indian hospitals, while the armies of our enemies were pouring over the Rhine and the Alps. When a colonial acquisition has been in prospect, we have thought no expenditure extravagant, no interference perilous. Gold has been to us as dust, and blood as water. Shall we never learn wisdom? Shall we never cease to prosecute a pursuit wilder than the wildest dream of alchymy, with all the credulity and all the profusion of Sir Epicure Mammon?

Those who maintain that settlements so remote conduce te the military or maritime power of nations, fly in the face of

history. The colonies of Spain were far more extensive and populous than ours. Has Spain, at any time within the last two centuries, been a match for England either by land or by sea? Fifty years ago, our colonial dominions in America were far larger and more prosperous than those which we at present possess. Have we since that time experienced any decay in our political influence, in our opulence, or in our security? Or shall we say that Virginia was a less val uable possession than Jamaica, or Massachusetts than Barbadoes?

The fact is, that all the evils of our Colonial system aro immensely aggravated in the West Indies by the peculiar character of the state of slavery which exists there. Our other settlements we have to defend only against foreign invasion. These we must protect against the constant enmity of the miserable bondsmen, who are always waiting for the moment of deliverance, if not of revenge. With our other establishments we may establish commercial relations advantageous to both parties. But these are in a state of absolute pauperism; for what are bounties and forced prices but an enormous poor-rate in disguise?

These are the benefits for which we are to be thankful. These are the benefits, in return for which we are to suffer a handful of managers and attorneys to insult the King, Lords, and Commons of England, in the exercise of rights as old and sacred as any part of our Constitution. If the proudest potentate in Europe, if the King of France, or the Emperor of all the Russias, had treated our Government as these creatures of our own have dared to do, should we not have taken such satisfaction as would have made the ears of all that heard of it to tingle? Would there not have been a stately manifesto, and a warlike message to both Houses, and vehement speeches from all parties, and unanimous addresses abounding in offers of lives and fortunes? If any English mob, composed of the disciples of Paine and Carlile, should dare to pull down a place of religious worship, to drive the minister from his residence, to threaten with de struction any other who should dare to take his place. would not the yeomanry be called out? Would not Parliament be summoned before the appointed time? Would there not be sealed bags and secret committees, and suspensions of the Habeas Corpus act? In Barbadoes all this has bee 'one