secession would be counterbalanced by the good that must arise to the nation from carrying into effect the judicious measure submitted to the consideration of the House. With regard to the people he had a better opinion of their good sense, than those who supposed that they could not distinguish their friends; they had been put to the proof by the public subscriptions proposed by ministers; and however that measure was decried, it was found that their pulse beat in perfect unison with that of government. Mr. Canning concluded by observing, that however he and his friends might be threatened with secessions in the House, and disturbances abroad, yet they would never be brought to consider themselves as the ambassadors from foreign states; but should continue to know and feel their own dignity, and wait for the subsequent approbation of the people. "In ordinary times it was the duty of the House to see that every part of the constitution was kept in repair, but now it was their duty to protect the whole. He knew that the members. of that house were considered as the best guardians and protectors of the people, with whom every pulse and artery moved in unison with those of Parliament." It may be here necessary to observe, that Mr. Canning had by this time obtained a respectable and confidential employment, as one of the jointsecrctaries of state in the foreign department, over which Lord Grenville at that period presided. In this capacity, he was of course made acquainted with the interior of the cabinet, and initiated early in life into all the mysteries of public business. On the dissolution of parliament he was returned for Wendover, and continued to support Mr. Pitt's administration until the retreat of that gentleman from power. In common with him, he at the same time reprobated the French rulers as base, cruel, and tyranni cal; cal; and attacked the slave-trade of the English colonies as unjust, barbarous, and impolitic. They both have uniformly supported Mr. Wilberforce in his attempts to abolish this horrid species of commerce; and we shall perceive from the following speech, delivered by the subject of this memoir, March 1, 1797, that he exerted all his powers and argument to put a stop to it. "The debate of to-night, he said, had afforded more novelty than he ever before remembered to have heard introduced upon this subject: and the novelty of the topics stated by the different opponents of the abolition, had been still farther diversified by the variety of lights in which even the same topics had been placed by the different gentlemen who made use of them. Nat only had a totally new set of assertions, a new train of reasoning, been adopted by the advocates of the slave-trade in general; but still further to perplex those who combated against them to extend still more widely their line of defence, they had so contrived it, that no two gentlemen had handled the same arms in the same manner, no two speeches, no two arguments, which the house had that night heard on that side of the question, but what had been for the most part inconsistent with each other. "Not that if this variety had been wanting to the debate, he should have felt any shame in going over again the path which had been so often trodden, and meeting again the miserable pleas so often urged in favour of this abominable trade, and so often refuted, with the same weapons, which had already been employed against them. The shame was not in the advancement of old arguments, but in the maintenance of inveterate abuses. It was not the pride of victory that was to be sought, it was not the dexterity of contest that was to be applauded, on such a question. And whatever triumph might arise from seeing that the old arguments for the abolition continued unanswered, was in his mind effectually damped by the regret that a mischief so inveterate and detestable remained unabated. "The "The House would recollect the situation in which the ques tion of the abolition now stood, a situation in which it had been placed by the motion of an honourable friend of his (Mr. C. Ellis) two years ago, a motion which had proceeded (he was pleased to say) from the purest benevolence, and which had been brought forward in a manner, which (as the House would well recollect) had done equal honour to the abilities and to the feelings of his honourable friend. The professed purpose of this motion was, to arrive gradually at the same end, which other gentlemen, and he (Mr. Canning) among the number, were desirous of reaching immediately-the final and entire termination of the trade in slaves. The mode proposed by his honourable friend's motion was, to address the King to recommend to the Colonial Assemblies to take such measures as, besides meliorating the condition of the negroes upon the islands, securing to them the immediate and active protection of the law when aggrieved by their masters, and other objects equally desirable, should ultimately lead to the final termination of the trade. "This then was the state of the question now before the House. The point for their consideration was, whether the Colonial Assemblies appeared, by the papers on the table, to have entered heartily and bona fide into measures, such as were recommended to them by his Majesty, in consequence of the address of the House of Commons in April 1797, and with the view and intent with which that address was framed, in respect to the termination of the trade. If they had done so he did not say, God forbid that he should! that those gentlemen who had voted against that address conceiving the mode pointed out in it to be inefficient, and who voted the same year for the direct abolition, could be at all embarrassed as to the vote which they ought to give in favour of the abolition this year; but he did admit that in that case those who had voted for that address, and who had relied upon the efficacy of the measures which it went to recommend, would be fairly entitled to argue that their experiment having succeeded thus far should continue to be tried a little longer. *But what is the real state of this case? The Assembly of Jamaica-for he would confine his observations upon this sub ject ject to Jamaica--both because the extent and population and importance of that island, and its immense proportion in the Slave Trade (near two-thirds, or perhaps three-fourths of the whole), gave it so large a share in this question, as to render all the other Colonies comparatively little worth considering; and because it was to it alone that the observations of the honourable gentleman (Mr. Sewell), and his right honourable friend (Mr. Dundas) had been confined-What was the conduct, what was the language, of the Assembly of Jamaica? And what were, the interpretations to which the honourable gentlemen (Mr. Sewell), and his right honourable friend, were obliged to have recourse to palliate and excuse it? The Assembly of Jamaica pass two acts-very good, for aught he knew, as matter of regulation-one for increasing the salaries of the clergy, the other for laying a duty amounting to a prohibition, (he begged the House to remark this, as he should have occasion to revert to it in another view presently,) on all negro slaves imported into the island above the age of twentyfive years. These two acts they transmit to the King, as what they have done to carry into effect His Majesty's gracious recommendation. It was hardly necessary for them to add that they were not intended to terminate the Slave Trade, because they might have defied the ingenuity of man to discover what there was in them that could, by any possibility, tend to its termination. But the Assembly of Jamaica was too open and ingenuous to leave its meaning to be found out by implication or construction. They speak out manfully. They tell His Majesty plainly, that in what they have done "They have been actuated by views of humanity only, and NOT with any view to the termination of the Slave Trade. "Could any thing be more plain, simple, and intelligible? Was there a man in the House, was there a child that could just read, who until his right honourable friend (Mr. Dundas's) ingenuity, and that of the honourable gentleman (Mr. Sewell), had been exercised upon this passage, could have for a moment mistaken its meaning? Here then the question, in all fairness and justice, ought to end. All parties were agreed that the Slave Trade ought to be terminated. There are two ways of terminating it; by this House, or by the colonial legislature. The colonial legislature tell you plainly they will not terminate it. What remains, but for this House to exercise its own power-always, in his mind, the best, but now clearly proved to be the only medium through which the termination of the trade could be effected. "But if there could be any additional light thrown upon the sense of a passage already as clear as noonday, what followed in the address was in itself the best commentary upon it. The two passages indeed mutually illustrated each other. "The right of obtaining labourers from Africa.' The Right! He had learned, indeed, by painful experience of what had of late years passed in the world, to associate the word right, with ideas very different from those which, in old times, it was calculated to convey. He had learned to regard the mention of rights as prefa tory to bloody, destructive, and desolating doctrines, hostile to the happiness and to the freedom of mankind. Such had been the lesson which he had been taught by the rights of man. But never, even in the practical application of that detested and pernicious doctrine, never, he believed, had the word right been so shamefully affixed to murder, to devastation, to the invasion of publie independence, to the pollution and destruction of private happiness, to gross and unpalliated injustice, to the spreading of misery and mourning over the earth, to the massacre of in. nocent individuals, and to the extermination of unoffending nations; never before was the word right so prostituted and misapplied, as when the right to trade in man's blood was asserted by the enlightened government of a civilized country. It was not wonderful that the slavery of Africa should be described in a term consecrated to French freedom. "But it was the right to import labourers-gentle words! Not slaves, not for the world, not to trade in slaves,' but to import labourers.' He now came to the arguments of some gentlemen who had been chiefly instrumental in introducing into the debate that degree of novelty and variety which, as he had set out with remarking, had eminently distinguished this debate from any other that he remembered on the same subject. Not contented with insisting, in the first place, that the declaration of the Assembly of Ja |