slaves, many modes are open which will give mutual satisfaction; but that when the masters stubbornly resist, then only one method can succeed — total and immediate freedom, followed by regulations which make the freedmen socially, industrially, and politically independent of the master's resentment. The more the ministers exerted themselves to "regulate" the slavery, the more bitter and violent did the planters or their substitutes become. Those who now say that the freedom ought to have been graduated, and that immediate emancipation was fanatical, simply show their total ignorance of the history — their folly and presumption.
Sir Fowell Buxton had become in Parliament the avowed leader of the Abolitionists, when Mr. Wilberforce, through growing infirmities, withdrew from public life. On May 15, 1823, he brought forward a motion that "slavery ought to be gradually abolished" (so little of obstinate fanaticism was there in the Abolitionists); but the ministry was frightened at being pledged to anything, and put forward Mr. Canning (an eloquent speaker for freedom) to oppose Mr. Buxton. Yet his "amendment" was nearly to the same effect. The matter was to be left in the hands of the ministry, but the House was to profess its anxiety for emancipation at the earliest moment compatible with the welfare of the slaves themselves (!) and the pecuniary interests of the planters. Mr. Canning plausibly stated, that "in the colonies the British Constitution was not in full play." The ministry, in fact, did not know how to enforce the ordinary rights of free negroes. But his liberal intentions were believed to be so sincere, that it was thought wiser by the Abolitionists to trust him, and hope for the best. No one had attributed to the Tory ministries of this century any superiority of talent. Mr. Canning was their only brilliant man; but many of them were highly respectable and worthy in private life, and were sincerely shocked that human beings should be deprived of the most elementary rights, and have no security against fantastic cruelties. The most despotically inclined of them, Lord Castlereagh, was driven to self-destruction in 1822 by a creditable sensitiveness that his Continental policy had issued in nothing but mischief to Italy and Sicily, with the near prospect of the undoing of English work in Spain. The death of Lord Castlereagh (who had very recently become Marquis of Londonderry) was just in time to stop Mr. Canning from sailing to India as governor-general, and installed him as foreign secretary. Though he could not save the constitution of Spain from the armies of France, while the Spanish king was treacherous, with Russia and Austria as allies in reserve, yet he sent a little army into Portugal, and told the combined sovereigns, in the hearing of Europe, that England by the stamp of her foot could raise up war against them in the heart of their own kingdoms. He likewise acknowledged the independence of the Spanish American colonies, all favorable to negro freedom, by which act (as he incautiously boasted) he "called into existence a new world to redress the balance of the old." He also successfully instigated President Monroe to issue the celebrated declaration, that the American Union could not be unconcerned at any attempt of European monarchy to establish itself on that side of the Atlantic. In short, this year 1823 was the first severance of England from the despotic Continental policy; it sent a throb of pride and confidence through the nation, and was a potent reinforcement of free sentiment in the ranks of the English gentry. Lord Sid-mouth, Lord Bathurst, Sir George Murray, Mr. Huskisson, and of younger men Mr. Peel and Lord Palmerston, were all scandalized by the details which the government received of West Indian cruelties, which not only went unpunished, but did not lower the credit and honor of the perpetrators.
To rehearse the dreadful accounts of intense cruelty and harassing miseries revealed to the colonial secretaries in official documents, would require many painful pages. Different colonies differed in degree of atrocity, yet everything seemed possible everywhere, and prevention or redress nowhere. Starvation and flogging were quite ordinary; but far more exquisite cruelties passed unreproved. The planters in the Bahamas, in reply to the circular of his Majesty's colonial minister, passed acts to amend their slave laws and improve the condition of the free colored people; but when their new code reached Lord Bathurst (1824), he pronounced the injustice of many of the enactments to be so manifest, that he "assured himself" the colonial legislature would remove them. But that legislature replied by impugning the English suggestions as injurious to them, and avowed that "a strong sense of the great impolicy and absolute danger of change compelled them to refuse to alter their laws any farther."
In Barbadoes, Mr. Moe, speaker of the Assembly, in transmitting their new code
