o the master, in whose
service they took place. Indeed, Mr. Long had laid it down in his
_History of Jamaica_, that the best way to secure the planters from ruin
would be to do that which the resolution recommended. It was notorious,
that when any planter was in distress, and sought to relieve himself by
increasing the labour on his estate, by means of the purchase of new
slaves, the measure invariably tended to his destruction. What then was
the importation of fresh Africans, but a system tending to the general
ruin of the islands?

But it had often been said, that without fresh importations the
population of the slaves could not be supported in the islands. This,
however, was a mistake. It had arisen from reckoning the deaths of the
imported Africans, of whom so many were lost in the seasoning, among the
deaths of the Creole slaves. He did not mean to say that, under the
existing degree of misery, the population would greatly increase; but,
he would maintain, that if the deaths and the births were calculated
upon those, who were either born, or who had been a long time in the
islands, so as to be considered as natives, it would be found that the
population had not only been kept up, but that it had been increased.

If it was true, that the labour of a free-man was cheaper than that of a
slave; and, also, that the labour of a long-imported slave was cheaper
than that of a fresh-imported one; and, again, that the chances of
mortality were much more numerous among the newly-imported slaves in the
West Indies, than among those of old standing there, (propositions,
which he took to be established,) we should see new arguments for the
impolicy of the trade.

It might be stated also, that the importation of vast bodies of men, who
had been robbed of their rights, and grievously irritated on that
account, into our colonies, (where their miserable condition opened new
sources of anger and revenge,) was the importation only of the seeds of
insurrection into them. And here he could not but view with astonishment
the reasoning of the West Indian planters, who held up the example of
St. Domingo as a warning against the abolition of the Slave Trade;
because the continuance of it was one of the great causes of the
insurrections and subsequent miseries in that devoted island. Let us but
encourage importations in the same rapid progression of increase every
year, which took place in St. Domingo, and we should witness the same
effec