anticipation of the order of time, to complete
our sketch. In view of the approach of full abolition, John Gladstone
induced Lord Glenelg, the whig secretary of state, to issue an order in
council (1837) permitting the West Indian planters to ship coolies from
India on terms drawn up by the planters themselves. Objections were made
with no effect by the governor at Demerara, a humane and vigorous man,
who had done much work as military engineer under Wellington, and who,
after abolishing the flogging of female slaves in the Bahamas, now set
such an iron yoke upon the planters and their agents in Demerara, that
he said 'he could sleep satisfied that no person in the colony could be
punished without his knowledge and sanction.'[18] The importation of
coolies raised old questions in new forms. The voyage from India was
declared to reproduce the horrors of the middle passage of the vanished
Guinea slavers; the condition of the coolie on the sugar plantations was
drawn in a light only less lurid than the case of the African negro; and
John Gladstone was again in hot water. Thomas Gladstone, his eldest son,
defended him in parliament (Aug. 3, 1839), and commissioners sent to
inquire into the condition of the various Gladstone plantations reported
that the coolies on Vreedestein appeared contented and happy on the
whole; no one had ever maltreated or beaten them except in one case; and
those on Vreedenhoop appeared perfectly contented. The interpreter, who
had abused them, had been fined, punished, and dismissed. Upon the
motion of W. E. Gladstone, these reports were laid upon the table of the
House in 1840.[19]

We shall have not unimportant glimpses, as our story unfolds itself, of
all these transactions. Meanwhile, it is interesting to note that the
statesman whose great ensign was to be human freedom, was thus born in a
family where the palliation of slavery must have made a daily topic. The
union, moreover, of fervid evangelical religion with antagonism to
abolition must in those days have been rare, and in spite of his devoted
faith in his father the youthful Gladstone may well have had uneasy
moments. If so, he perhaps consoled himself with the authority of
Canning. Canning, in 1823, had formally laid down the neutral principles
common to the statesmen of the day: that amelioration of the lot of the
negro slave was the utmost limit of action, and that his freedom as a
result of amelioration was the object of a pious hope