taken place in Demerara under it. The protector, and the superior courts in that colony, had it in their power, by that order, to modify the fine, for any offence committed, from L.100 to L5, and from L.500 to L.100, according to the circumstances of the case; but the influence of the anti-colonial party, for their influence I assert it is, has lately got instructions sent out to the protector and the superior courts, commanding them in every offence, whatever may be the degree, to exact the highest penalty, without any power of modification whatever!

My Lord, the laws of Algiers, Persia, and Turkey, are justice and mercy when compared to a law like this. Yet, if the colonists oppose it, they will be set down as contumacious! Even the power of complaining is, it would appear, taken from them. In an official dispatch, addressed to SIR BENJAMIN D'URBAN, the Governor of Demerara, by the late Under Secretary, MR HORTON, and dated 6th June, 1826, we find, amongst other restrictions which the governor was commanded to impose upon Mr Alexander Stevenson, before he obtained permission to continue the publica tion of the Guiana Chronicle, the following" Abstinence from all comments on the slave question, except such as are calculated to promote the measures recommended by his Majesty's government, and sanctioned by Parliament!" In other words, he was to support every act emanating from government which had emancipation in view, without any reference to the property of the master, the comfort of the slaves, or the actual safety of the colony! The official gazettes of the Crown Colonies are all thus chained, and must, whatever "ennui" it may bring upon themselves or their readers, dance in fetters to any tune which Aldermanbury Street may drive Downing Street to play.

Throughout our colonies, those functionaries of every rank who obey the satellites of, and the mandates which are issued by, Pringle and Co., can alone enjoy peace or keep their places. If they act as the real interests of the colonies, and of this country, and as truth and honour dictate to them, then their lives are rendered miserable, and they are speed

ily displaced to make way for more pliable hands. Such treatment is, I learn, about to drive Lord BELMORE from Jamaica; such influence tore that honest man, COLONEL YOUNG, from Demerara, and planted him in a small island in the Gulf of St Lawrence, with an income reduced onehalf, by way of advantageous preferment! It would be endless to enumerate instances of a similar kind. The principles which at present guide Downing Street in its choice of colonial rulers are, that no individual who has been in, and has told the truth about the colonies, or who has in Great Britain publicly uttered one word in their defence, is fit to hold, or to be permitted to hold, authority in them!! Monstrous, my Lord, as such a system is, still the fact is, that it is the system pursued.

As an excuse for such extraordinary conduct, we are officially told that the colonists ought to be excluded from every exercise of authority, because "the universally acknowledged principle of justice is, that no man should be a judge in a case where he is himself united by any tie of common interest with one of the parties concerned." By acting in this manner, the government do not, they say, insult the feelings, or depreciate the characters of the colonists, any more than they do the subordinate authorities established in this country, where it is not thought right in those parts of it "in which disputes between manufacturers and their workmen are of frequent occurrence, that one of the former class should act as a magistrate!" To the people of this country, the fact is notorious, that magistrates are indiscriminately appointed from, and act indiscriminately amongst, the manufacturing and agricultural population, and those chosen are properly selected on account of their local knowledge and experience. The principle, therefore, which the government applies to establish subordinate authority in the colonies, is directly at variance with the principle adopted in this country; but of the operation of which, and also of the fact, the Downing Street rulers of the colonies, it would appear from what has just been stated, are completely ignorant; nay, more, when injustice,

under the mask of law, runs riot in a West India colony against the property of absent white and free British subjects, the Colonial Office turns round upon the complaining sufferer, and tells him that he suffers because proprietors do not reside in the colonies to aid in the administration of the laws! Will my Lord Howick deny the truth of that which I now state?

The most pernicious principles prevail in those departments of government connected with the colonies. These state, We know that the measures which we pursue will ruin British North America and North American merchants; but what about that?-we shall in their room have Norway and Baltic merchants! We know that the measures which we pursue will ruin the West India colonies, and the whole mercantile and shipping interests connected with them; but what about that? we shall in their stead have Brazil, Cuba, &c. trade and shipping interests, and the nation will lose nothing. These colonial dictators cannot be brought to comprehend that the loss of the whole property and capital of all the proprietors and merchants alluded to, is not only so much dead loss to the nation, but that by this loss, an equal value is placed in the hands of foreign and rival nations, which will enable them to wrest more wealth from us; and ultimately to shackle, to degrade, and to enslave us.

The blindness of Great Britain upon all these subjects is quite unaccountable. On the part of her government, it is separated from the principles of reason and all right feeling. The judgment of a schoolboy would lead that schoolboy to comprehend, that the more pains Great Britain takes to degrade and to ruin her extensive and valuable colonial possessions, the more pains foreign nations will take to exalt and to render theirs prosperous; in order that when those belonging to Great Britain are destroyed, these nations may reap all the advantages, commercial and political, which the British colonies have so long given to the parent state. Hence the extension of the African slave-trade to Cuba and the Brazils. Into the latter alone, according to official documents just published, 76,000 slaves were im

ported last year! The sinews of our commercial and financial strength are, in fact, and in more ways than one, drawn from us to support that trade.

If, my Lord, the emancipation of the slaves in the British colonies is to prove, commercially and politically, so great an advantage as it is asserted it will do, why does not the nation purchase the whole, take the management of the concern into their own hands, and thus enrich herself? Admitting that it would be a meritorious and right thing to enlighten and to civilize the African barbarians, planted by Great Britain in the western world, still, it is asked, why should the heavy burden, and the trouble of effecting that object, be imposed upon the West India colonist without any remuneration for his labour? Why should the colonist be called upon, without reward, to enlighten and reclaim savages for the good of the nation, while the Macauley's, "et hoc genus omne,” are richly rewarded for merely trying to do the same thing in Sierra Leone? I say merely trying; for while, after a vast expense to this country, they have effected nothing, the West India colonists, without any expense to the country, but at a great expense to themselves, have effected a great deal.

The West India colonists assert, that neither the government nor this country ever will accomplish the objects which they propose by the measures and course which they pursue, and they assert this from local knowledge and experience. Let the government and the country therefore take the property in the colonies into their own hands, and then experiment upon it as they please; but till they do this, the colonists cannot be called upon to be at the risk and the expense of experiments, which we are told are undertaken for the national good. In this country, where a turnpike-road, a rail-road, or a canal, or any public edifice or thing is undertaken, or to be erected for public use, private property cannot be appropriated or invaded to do so until its value is ascertained and paid by the public, and the consequent consent of the proprietor obtained. The same principle ought to guide Britain in her conduct to her colonies;

and until she acts in this manner, she has no right to call upon the colonists to become her slaves-under such circumstances, slaves they would in reality be-to attempt to carry her crude and dangerous schemes into effect.

The extent to which the minds of their countrymen are poisoned against, and alienated from the colonies, is best shewn by the opposition, coupled with revilings, which is always made to every just and rational' measure which is proposed to relieve them from their undeniable and overwhelming distress. Thus the landed interest determined that foreign grain shall continue to be used in British distillation, in preference to British colonial molasses,-nay, the landed interest, and the distillers combined, have determined that neither the brewers nor distillers shall have it in their power to use the latter, even if they were inclined, and felt it their interest to do so; in like manner, and notwithstanding all the clamours which the anti-colonists and the people of this country raise against the African slave-trade, they advocate and permit the admission of Brazil sugar into Great Britain to refine it for the foreign market, although the Brazilians not only maintain personal slavery, but carry on the African slave-trade to a prodigious extent! Mr Poulett Thomson boldly told us (House of Commons, Sept. 28th), that "a very large amount of British capital was employed in producing sugar in the Brazils, and

that it was for the advantage of this country that those capitalists should be allowed to bring the sugar so produced to this country in British ships!" In like manner, also, the clamourers against the West India colonies advocate the free admission of grain from Poland and Eastern Prussia, which grain is all produced by the labour of slaves! Such conduct, my Lord, is as impolitic and unwise as it is inconsistent.

The colonial possessions of Great Britain may properly be divided into two heads: first, such colonies as are commanding military and naval stations and outworks of the national citadel-such as the Ionian islands, Malta, Gibraltar, &c., where the expenditure is necessarily beyond the apparent advantages which the nation receives; secondly, the North American colonies, the West India colonies, and the Cape of Good Hope, &c. These are not only military and naval stations of the very first importance to the strength of the British empire, but also commercial and agricultural points of the greatest possible importance in the scale of commerce and finance, and from which the returns to the nation and to individuals far exceed in value the expense which is incurred. I shall place these before your Lordship in the different bearings of the question, and with the accuracy which the latest official returns that have come into my hands enable me to do.