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3 and 4 Will. IV., was in operation against the British colonist, must now and henceforth work in his favour: for he will be no longer the possessor of a capital invested in slaves, but an employer of free labour; and engaged, not merely by public opinion or personal feeling, but by direct pecuniary interest, in the extinction of slavery. He is become, therefore, the natural and zealous ally of the abolitionists, and the only effective agent for the civilization of the negroes.

If, under a continuance of the restrictions, the expense of freelabour would oblige the dealer to add 9s. per cwt., a remission of those restrictions equivalent to 5s. 6d. will enable him to limit the advance of price to 3s. 6d. This has a double advantage. It vastly diminishes the danger, which we have already deprecated, of an impatient cry for slave-grown produce, by lightening the consumer's expense for the produce of free-labour; and it prevents the abandonment of colonial establishments, by keeping up the consumption of a poor but numerous class of buyers, who, if the full burthen had been retained, would have been unable to continue their purchases. The importance of this last consideration will not fail to impress the reader, when he reflects that the prospects of the negroes' general improvement, no less than the comfort of the people at home, and the interests of our colonial commerce, depend almost wholly on the extent to which West Indian industry can be maintained at present. If by rendering prices moderate, and consumption general, through a judicious relaxation, we can so counteract the disadvantage of the increased cost occasioned by the substitution of free for slave labour, as to keep colonial cultivation for the British market, during the next few years, up to anything like a considerable proportion of its old extent-then, although it must be admitted that our colonies will still have lost much, (with reference especially to the produce once exported by them to the continent, which is irreparable in every view,) we shall still have accomplished a most important result. We shall have saved two-thirds, perhaps fivesixths of our colonial possessions from ruin, and their negro-peasantry from desertion, idleness, and demoralization; and we shall have preserved the vital principle of our West Indian commerce, to be extended hereafter as occasion may mature itself.

Do what we may, however, the plain, disagreeable truth still is, that we can, in no possible mode, avoid a loss in some shape or other, to the whole extent of the difference in price between free and slave labour. We may distribute and apportion that loss; but we cannot get rid of it. We have for a vast number of years carried on a trade in sugar, in which we netted, by the labour of slaves, a profit of 9s. or 10s. per cwt. beyond what we

could

could otherwise have attained. We have now, by a great national enactment, given up that profit. But having so given it up, we must patiently bear the privation, and not deceive ourselves into a supposition, that, by any arrangement or contrivance between one set of interests and another, we can at least for a long time to come-retrieve a single penny of what we have fairly surrendered.

Yet perhaps eventually, even with a view to profit, the present maintenance of the West Indian plantations may prove itself a measure of no unproductive character. We have already pointed out the probability that our foreign rivals, from the new circumstances of the times, and most especially from the emancipation of the British slaves, will henceforth be more than ever exposed to those perils of insurrection and devastation by which St. Domingo was lost to France. We have shown how surely a successful revolt in any one quarter must be the signal for similar explosions in others; and by what cogent and not tardy causes the region and reign of slavery are likely to be narrowed. We hold it to be clear, at all events, that whenever any effectual check shall be given to the fresh importation of slaves, the foreign colonies, from the insufficient proportion of their female to their male negroes, and from their inexperience in those arts of amelioration by which the British planters have held their slave-population together, must rapidly lose that great command of cheap labour which at present enables them to strive so advantageously against England in the production of sugar. But if, while these defections are beginning to take place in the productive powers of neighbouring colonies, those of Great Britain shall have been enabled, by the proposed remissions in aid of free labour, to maintain their extensive production at five-sixths, or even two-thirds, of its present amount, by negroes working for wages, our colonial industry must stand upon a basis more firm and lasting than slavery could ever have constructed. Our emancipated Creoles, gradually learning, from their new state of society, and from their more equal intercourse with the whites, to entertain artificial wants and appetites, and more and more generally accustoming themselves, as their growing population diminishes their facilities of comfortable subsistence, to engage in stipendiary labour as the only means by which such wants and appetites can be gratified, will form a community of labourers ready and able to extend the operations of the British planter in the continental markets, as the produce of the foreign colonies falls off; for the diminution of foreign production will have been raising prices in those markets towards their proper level—that is, towards the level at which free labour may be employed with a profit; and when this level, which is the only natural one, shall

have been so attained in the foreign markets, the British West Indians, possessing the exclusive advantage of an established population of stipendiary negroes, may fairly expect to become the principal sugar-merchants of Europe; or, at least, their only important competitors are likely to be the East Indian cultivators, who then, at prices so much increased, may be able, though they be not now, to transmit their sugar with advantage. This addition to the colonial commerce of England, and the consequent increase of her shipping, and of all the manufactures and productions which she would supply to the negroes in their advancing demand for the artificial comforts of life, would go far to compensate, in new modes of revenue, the relaxations which we have been recommending in the code of colonial intercourse.

We cannot conclude without once more, and earnestly, pressing on the public mind the consideration of the state into which the emancipated negroes must fall, if cultivation be discontinued to an extent which shall break up the employment of labour. To have given freedom to your negroes is to have paid but half your long-accumulated debt: with freedom you must give the means of industry, or you will not have provided the opportunities of civilization and improvement due from you. The only fair chance for their social, or moral, or religious advancement, is the presence and example of European employers, of European teachers, of European manners, and of European motives. Continue to find them occupation with adequate recompense-give them an option of labour with their liberty-and the arts and the virtues of life may grow up and thrive; but if all you restore to them is their idleness, you have made them the most pernicious of presents. The fertile soil and the relaxing climate will speedily resolve them into their aboriginal barbarism. Hordes of irreclaimable savages will take the place of a Christian population and a civilized society. The foreign slave-trade, no longer forced to fetch its cargoes from distant Africa, will be commodiously supplied by Creole kidnappers, in short safe runs from the English islands. You will see your busy ports converted into riotous dens of black buccaneers, and the flags of the negro pirates insulting all that wide archipelago. Africa will have had her revenge, but Freedom, Justice, and Religion no amends.

NOTE

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We have received from Dr. Keith, author of a work on the Prophecies,' which we reviewed in this Number, a letter contradicting certain statements in that reviewal, and which the writer requests us to insert in this place. Dr. Keith's letter is so long in itself, and would have required so much comment from us, that we could not, under any circumstances, have complied with this request; but it contains distinct information that a detailed Answer to our Article on his book is about to be published in a separate form, The Doctor could hardly expect us to recur twice to the subject;—and it would, therefore, have been due to his own interests that we should wait for the appearance of this tract.

NOTE

To the Article on Cooke's Memoirs of Bolingbroke in No. CVIII. THE intelligent writer of some remarks on this Article in No. LXXXV. of the Printing Machine has addressed to us a letter, in which he affords still further confirmation of our opinion as to what he justly calls the niaiseries and blunders' of Mr. Cooke's book. One point on which we spoke with some degree of hesitation, namely the date of the first publication of Bolingbroke's famous letter to Sir William Windham,' our correspondent has ascertained to be as we had suspected; and the matter is so important to Lord Bolingbroke's history, and so conclusive as to the ignorance and negligence of his lordship's recent biographer, that we think it worth while to subjoin our Correspondent's comment upon it. He says, 'In addition to the reasons assigned in the Quarterly Review for believing that the letter to Windham was not printed at the time at which it professes to have been (and probably was) written, several passages might have been quoted from it which show that the author had no intention of publishing it immediately, if at all. But, in point of fact, it was certainly bequeathed to Mallet only in manu script. His copy, that which he sent to the printers, is in the Museum, along with all the other manuscripts left to him for publication by Bolingbroke. It is not in Bolingbroke's hand, nor are any of the other papers, but it is, like the rest, corrected throughout by his lordship. More than one amanuensis had been employed on it.'

We have examined the MS. in the Museum (4984, A. Plut. CXVI. E.), and find the case to be as stated by our correspondent, excepting that some entire pages towards the conclusion are in Bolingbroke's own handwriting.

This discovery appears to us to confirm our suspicion to absolute certainty —to give a totally new turn to the most important part of Bolingbroke's history-aud, moreover, to give the coup de grace to Mr. Wingrove Cooke's contemptible compilation.

THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

FEBRUARY, 1836.

ART. I.-Die Römische Päpste, ihre Kirche und ihre Staat im sechszehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert. Von Leopold Ranke. Erster band. Berlin. 1835.

(The Popes of Rome, their Church and State during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.)

WE envy the dispassionate and philosophical serenity with

which the German historian may contemplate the most remarkable and characteristic portion of the annals of modern Europe the rise, progress, and influence of the Papal power. In this country, the still-reviving, and, it is almost to be feared, unextinguishable animosity between the conflicting religious parties, the unfortunate connexion with the political feuds and hostilities of our own days, would almost inevitably, even if involuntarily, colour the page of the writer; while perfect and unimpassioned equability would provoke the suspicious and sensitive jealousy of the reader, to whichever party he might belong. On one side there is an awful and sacred reverence for the chair of St. Peter, which would shrink from examining too closely even the political iniquities, which the most zealous Roman Catholic cannot altogether veil from his reluctant and half-averted gaze; while, on the other, the whole Papal history is looked upon as one vast and unvarying system of fraud, superstition, and tyranny. In truth-notwithstanding the apparently uniform plan of the Papal policy-notwithstanding the rapid succession of ecclesiastics, who, elected in general at a late period of life, occupied the spiritual throne of the Vaticanthe annals of few kingdoms, when more profoundly considered, possess greater variety, are more strongly modified by the genius of successive ages, or are more influenced by the personal character of the reigning sovereign. Yet, in all times, to the Roman Catholic the dazzling halo of sanctity, to the Protestant the thick darkness which has gathered round the pontifical tiara, has obscured the peculiar and distinctive lineaments of the Gregories, and Innocents, and Alexanders. As a whole, the Papal history has been by no means deeply studied, or distinctly understood; in no country has the modern spiritual empire of Rome found its Livy or its Polybius; no masterly hand has traced the changes in its political relations to the rest of Europe from the real date of

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