length carried to completion. But the interval between the decision concerning James Somerset and the act of 1833 which emancipated the slaves, just exceeded half a century. This largely depended on the vicious implication of the English ministry in the system.
Most of the colonies had independent local legislatures, and the apparent power of the British ministry was limited to vetoing their acts. Not but that they generally stood in such awe of insurrection that a force of British soldiers was needful to them, which force any ministry could withdraw if they were contumacious. But they made sure that no ministry would dare to expose them to possible massacre; insomuch that the Jamaica legislature, in a pet, threatened to send the English soldiers home. In every practical sense the power of our ministers was certainly limited in striving against the desperate mischief which the connivance of their predecessors had established. But there was one recently acquired colony in which the power of the crown was not restricted — Trinidad, a considerable island, ninety miles long, fifty broad, opposite the mouths of the Orinoco. It belonged first to the Spaniards, then to the French, and was captured by Abercrombie so late as 1797 Mr. Pitt was then in full power. A glorious opportunity was offered to this advocate of freedom to annihilate slavery in Trinidad; but apparently he had not the heart to carry out his own principles, even where he had no need to court votes. He was probably as afraid to encounter the ill-will of the West Indian planters, as Mr. Lincoln to meet the frown of Kentucky. Not only was this precious opportunity lost, but the ministry were put afresh into the very evil position of themselves acknowledging, regulating, and establishing slavery in an island where neither the English Parliament nor any old routine hampered them. This false position they bequeathed as an evil legacy to their successors. Those who were themselves "regulating" a strictly illegal inhumanity in Trinidad and Guiana, could do nothing but seek to regulate and soften it in the other colonies. To declare for freedom was to condemn their predecesssors, and some of themselves. Thus they were (so to say) constrained to justify slavery as such, to censure only any extremes of cruelty, and to maintain that the master had earned by the long custom of fraud and oppression a right to compensation (just as did Mr. Bruce, now Lord Aberdare, concerning the publicans — the renewal of their licenses by negligent routine had given them a moral right to continued renewal!) — and these ministers were to conduct the process by which alone freedom could be established. A most unpromising conjuncture!
To these difficulties of the position was added a religious controversy. It could not be pretended that either the Old or New Testament forbade slavery as a national institution; it was a manifest fact that Paul exhorted slaves to obey their masters, "as service to Christ;" nay, that he sent back the fugitive slave Onesimus to his Christian master Philemon, and did not command the master to enfranchise the slave, nor to pay up all the wages of which he had defrauded him, but contented himself with begging forgiveness for the slave if he had stolen anything, and urging his reception as a brother in Christ, since Paul had converted him. Liberal interpreters may give excellent reasons why the conduct of the apostle cannot be a law of life. But of course the slave-owners, both in the West Indies and on the American continent, triumphantly claimed the great apostle as on their side; and, what is remarkable, they carried with them in their advocacy of "the letter which killeth" (to use St. Paul's own words) not the ignorant vulgar, but the more educated and refined, who ought to have discerned the broad principles of justice and morality preached by the apostle as paramount over isolated texts and detail of conduct. It cannot be doubted that sympathy with wealth and aristocracy was the cause: thus the more accomplished clergy of the Episcopal churches became apologists or advocates of slavery, while the less educated Nonconformists stood up for freedom and right. Yet each party claimed the Bible as on its side. In Jamaica, by far the largest of our West Indian islands, there was already a bishop, and it is only too clear that he drew his inspiration from the planters. What is more deplorable, our bishops in the House of Lords were never on the right side. In 1852 Sir George Stephen, writing a short retrospect, observes that reformers in England had one advantage over the American Union — namely, in titled leaders. "Royalty lent us countenance in the person of William, Duke of Gloucester; Lord Lansdowne, Lord Grenville, Lord Grey, and many peers of minor note gave their unqalified support. The bishops — no! the less we say of their Right Reverend Lordships in connection with slavery the better." John Wesley had seen slavery in
