without punishment; nay, a few years later, received high honor from the queen. When Virginia attained a fixed condition as a colony — scarcely before 1615, in which year fifty acres of land were assigned to every emigrant and his heirs — the cultivation of tobacco instantly followed. Five years later a Dutch ship brought a cargo of negroes from the coast of Africa, whom the Virginians (a mixed body of very low morals) joyfully received as slaves. But neither the slave trade nor slavery had any legal sanction. King James was always in debt, and far too much occupied with his own miserable pleasures to care about such a peccadillo, though in granting a new constitution for Virginia he reserved a veto to their laws for the court in England. Under James I. and Charles I. the English Parliament was helpless, and the slavery once introduced became chronic; children and grandchildren were born in slavery, and the system spread to our new colonies on the continent. Of the West Indian islands, most were occupied, and slavery introduced, by other European nations before us, so that England, in conquering them, found slavery existing.
No sooner had we got free from struggle against the Stuarts than King William III. involved us in Continental war. Our growing maritime power sufficed to enforce anything upon the colonies on which the Parliament was bent; but the mass of the people knew little about the negroes, and the religion of Protestants, being constructed too much on the mere letter of the Bible, was not at all shocked by the idea of slavery. It was otherwise with the slave trade. Man-stealing is denounced by name in the New Testament as an odious wickedness, and common sense taught every one that to hunt and capture Africans for slaves or to buy them of the captors was as gross and indefensible a cruelty as if Algerines were to land on our coasts and carry Englishmen into slavery — a lot which did befall some of our seamen when intercepted by these pirates. Brydges, in his "History of Jamaica," tells us that as many as seventy thousand slaves were imported into that island during the ten years, 1751-1760. It is a popular error to suppose that Parliament passed a law to legalize the slave trade — an error propagated by the violent and unscrupulous men who engaged in it. But the law which undertook to "regulate the trade of Africa" (23d of George II.) added a strict prohibition, under penalties, against taking on board or carrying away any African "by force or fraud." Fraud and violence were freely used; but the colonial authorities winked at it. The home ministry perhaps had no "official information;" and even in this century we know that the president of the Board of Control and the chairman of the Hon. East India Company professed in Parliament profound ignorance and disbelief of what was notorious to the missionaries and indigo-planters, that the revenue over the greater part of India was collected by torture. Each ministry in turn coveted the support of as many "interests" as possible, and dreaded to make any great "interest" its enemy.
How soon "the planting interest" became powerful it is hard to say, but it is certain that in the middle of the last century they were a compact political body, and that there was a permanent connivance on the part of the British ministries, who did not choose to risk incurring the planters' enmity. Besides, since the crown had reserved for itself a veto on colonial legislation, which abounded with acts assuming slavery as legal, and with severe enforcements on the oppressed victims, all the ministries in succession implicated themselves in the guilt by not advising the sovereign to use the veto. Moreover, as time went on, the English crown had slave colonies of its own, in which was no colonial legislature. These were counted as four, viz. two in Guiana (Demerara and Berbice), St. Lucia, and Trinidad. The Cape and the Mauritius were soon added. Thus while no Parliamentary sanction was given to the slave trade or to slavery (further than the careless use of the word slave, perhaps by the cunning amendment of planters sitting in the House), the executive government both at home and in the colonies treacherously and by lachesse established it in fact, though this could not make it legal. Americans of the Southern States have often reproached England with
