EMANCIPATION OF SLAVES. 317 XLIII. As soon as he had overcome the resistance of the ninety men who opposed the Peace Preservation Bill, Mr. Stanley let drop the combative and dangerous office of Irish Secretary. Instead of being a Secretary to a superior officer of the Crown, he became one of the three Secretaries of State who had no one between them and the Monarch. He took the Colonial Office, which had been held in 1829-30 by a resolute soldier, but in other years had been presided over by men too inactive to master the permanent officials. A strong will was needed in the department; and a question which had been kept simmering for ten years was now to be set in the flame. Mr. Stanley is said to have, by himself, framed the legislative measure called the Act for the Emancipation of Slaves, which employed Parliament at intervals through the second half of the great session. His proper advisers in the office knew a great deal about the slaves, but they had not in this case, as usual, a great advantage over people not in office; for there had been reports lately issued by parliamentary committees which examined witnesses fresh from the slave lands; and there was an anti-slavery society which, by a regular periodical journal, by occasional pamphlets, and by oral statements made in meetings and reported by newspapers, kept the people of Britain abreast of their skilled servants in knowledge about their tropical dependencies. A 318 NECESSITY FOR IMPROVEMENT. certain book-keeper or clerk, who had been employed for three months in Jamaica, and had seen how a plantation was managed, put his evidence into a pamphlet of which two hundred thousand copies were dispersed by sale or by gift in the early summer. There was no subject more popular, none more easy to preach about. The reasonable zeal, which had in 1807 urged the Whigs to abolish the slave trade, which had in 1814 compelled Lord Castlereagh to appear at Vienna as the deliverer of negroes, which had sustained every Board of Admiralty in keeping up squadrons to enforce Lord Castlereagh's treaties, was not peculiar to devout Christians. But the emulation of Christian sects, and that desire of enterprise which gives life and personality to a voluntary congregation, were constantly aiding the bondsmen, and frequently stimulating the men of the world. The House which Mr. Canning led had agreed with one voice that the condition of the negroes ought to be improved; nor did anyone openly sneer at their being taught Christian doctrines. Missionaries were employed by the British congregations to train the human beings who belonged to the landowners of the sugar-growing and coffee-growing islands. In ordinary times they were free to build chapels and to open schools for the blacks. But when the blacks were childishly exhilarated by those rumours of liberty which were the broken echoes of parliamentary speaking, the managers of plantations, remembering the slaughter and pillage which followed a similar fermenting of hope in the French colony of PERSECUTION OF MISSIONARIES. 319 St. Domingo, were not unnaturally frightened; and in the paroxysm of precaution they were unjust to the Christian teachers, whom they took to be mischief makers. In Demerara, a rich land taken from the Dutch, there was one of those fits of fury which, since the invention of alcoholic liquors, have often disgraced the European races. A good minister, employed by a Missionary Society, was cruelly imprisoned, and by the imprisonment slain. His innocence was proved by Mr. Brougham and Sir James Mackintosh to the satisfaction of the House of Commons. A clergyman of the Episcopal Church bore witness for him at his own peril, saying 'that the planters sought the life of the man whose teaching had saved theirs.'1 In Barbadoes, the oldest of the English sugar colonies and the most thickly peopled with white people, a mob tried to kill a Wesleyan missionary; an Episcopal clergyman gave him a hiding-place. Thus the Gospel had its martyrs and confessors, clear of legendary haze, authentically enrolled, and made known to multitudes. Such men were the heroes of an age of abstinence from war. The gentlemen, who spent in England the profits of West Indian estates, profits which most of them 1 This clergyman, Mr. Austin, was recommended for promotion by a bishop to the Lord Chancellor, Brougham, avowedly on the ground of his gallant conduct in Demerara. The Chancellor, of course, knew all about him; but it was hard for him to find benefices for all the deserving men. During his tenure of office, four years, he was presented with twelve hundred volumes of sermons. 320 WEAKNESS OF ANTI-SLAVERY PARTY. mistook for permanent rents, shared with their partners who watched the crops, with their agents, and with harder men who took plantations as temporary investments, the reproach of persecution. They were hurt at being misunderstood; as philanthropy became intrusive, they began to feel that they were themselves persecuted. They believed that their slaves were happier than English cottagers; and one or two light literary men printed narratives of towns or visits which seemed to confirm the belief; for the travellers had seen the easy laughter—not the whippings; had seen the labourers resting and forgetting, but had not counted the hours of labour. Believing in their own good intentions, the proprietors vehemently resented interference; and they were too respectable to be lightly handled by Ministries. All through the last seven years of Tory Government the friends of the blacks were hopelessly weak in Parliament; there were but six members who were ready to sacrifice other projects to the project of emancipation; the Liberals who gave them excellent help in an occasional debate were not inclined, and could hardly be expected, to be what men of the world called 'impracticable.' At no time before 1830 could the members who were for the extinction of slavery equal in numbers or influence these purchasers of boroughs who sat in the House to defend their sugar and coffee. But a project could even in the old House be kept before the leader, 1 This word historically belongs to the section of Whigs which for a few years followed Mr. Whitbread. DIFFERENTIAL DUTIES ON SUGAR. 321 session after session, by one or two uncompromising men; and year after year it became more difficult to The Liberal Tories who had the upper hand in the last three Tory Cabinets durst not fall short of Mr. Canning's philanthopy; but they were afraid to overrule the little Parliaments of the sugar islands. There were four colonies, which, because they had been recently won in war from France, Spain, and Holland, had no representative assemblies; they were called by a name as uninstructive as most English political terms, Crown Colonies. These were treated with less deference than the brilliant Jamaica and the chartered Barbadoes. There were three or four little islands which had their Parliaments, and yet were fairly respectful to the imperial Parliament; in these it was thought that a known Abolitionist would perhaps escape stoning. When advice given by the King in Council was disregarded, it was suggested that the less obstinate islands might be tempted, and the others frightened, into compliance with the Orders which mitigated slavery, if differential duties were levied in British Custom-houses on their produce, so as to charge, say, a pound of sugar a shilling if it came from a place where women were scourged, and sixpence if it came from a place where women were not scourged. There were two things in conjuncture, which brought the ten years' bickering to a final conflict and reconciling. One was an alarming revolt of blacks in Jamaica. The other was the Reform Bill. |