I would entreat you
to consider well _how impracticable it will become to carry on
coercive labor_--always difficult, it would in future be in peril of
constant comparisons with other colonies made free, and with those
estates in this island made free by individual proprietors.

As Governor, under these circumstances, and I never shrink from any
of my responsibilities, _I pronounce it physically impossible to
maintain the apprenticeship with any hope of successful agriculture._

* * * * *

"_Gentlemen of the Council,

Mr. Speaker, and gentlemen of the Assembly._

Jamaica, is in your hands--she requires repose, by the removal of a
law which has _equally tormented the laborer, and disappointed the
planter_--a law by which man still constrains man in unnatural
servitude. This is her first exigency. For her future welfare she
appeals to your wisdom to legislate in the spirit of the times, with
liberality and benevolence towards all classes."

* * * * *

When such a man as Sir Lionel Smith pronounced it no longer practicable
to carry on coercive labor, he must have been a bold as well as a rash
planter who would venture to hold on to the old system under Lord
Glenelg's improvement Act. Accordingly we find some of the staunchest
advocates of slavery, men who had been fattening on the oppression of
the apprentices up to that moment the first, and the most precipitate,
is their proposals of abolition. Mr. Hyslop, Mr. Gay and others were for
acting at once on the Governor's speech without referring it to a
committee. The former said: "He believed that a proposition would be
made to abandon the apprenticeship from the 1st of August, _but he would
say let it be abandoned from Sunday next_. He would therefore move that
the speech be made the order of the day for tomorrow."

Mr. Guy said:--

"The Governor's speech contained nothing more than what every Gentlemen
expected, _and what every Gentlemen, he believed, was prepared to do. In
short he_ would state that _a bill had already been prepared by him,
which he intended to introduce tomorrow, for the abolition of the
apprenticeship on the 1st of August next_."

Both these gentlemen are well known by the readers of Jamaica papers as
obstinate defenders slavery. The latter was so passionately devoted to
the abuses of the apprenticeship that Lord Sligo was