be under the protection of the law was
in fact to be a freeman; and to unite slavery and freedom in one
condition was impracticable. The abolition, on the other hand, was
exactly such an agent as the case required. All hopes of supplies from
the coast being cut off, breeding would henceforth become a serious
object of attention; and the care of this, as including better clothing,
and feeding, and milder discipline, would extend to innumerable
particulars, which an act of assembly could neither specify nor enforce.
The horrible system, too, which many had gone upon, of working out their
slaves in a few years, and recruiting their gangs with imported
Africans, would receive its death-blow from the abolition of the trade.
The opposite would force itself on the most unfeeling heart. Ruin would
stare a man in the face, if he were not to conform to it. The
non-resident owners would then express themselves in the terms of Sir
Philip Gibbs, "that he should consider it as the fault of his manager,
if he were not to keep up the number of his slaves." This reasoning
concerning the different tendencies of the two systems was self-evident;
but facts were not wanting to confirm it. Mr. Long had remarked, that
all the insurrections and suicides in Jamaica had been found among the
imported slaves, who, not having lost the consciousness of civil rights,
which they had enjoyed in their own country, could not brook the
indignities to which they were subjected in the West Indies. An instance
in point was afforded also by what had lately taken place in the island
of Dominica. The disturbance there had been chiefly occasioned by some
runaway slaves from the French islands. But what an illustration was it
of his own doctrine to say, that the slaves of several persons, who had
been treated with kindness, were not among the number of the insurgents
on that occasion!

But when persons coolly talked of putting an end to the Slave Trade
through the medium of the West India legislatures, and of gradual
abolition, by means of regulations, they surely forgot the miseries
which this horrid traffic occasioned in Africa during every moment of
its continuance. This consideration was conclusive with him, when called
upon to decide whether the Slave Trade should be tolerated for a while,
or immediately abolished. The divine law against murder was absolute and
unqualified. Whilst we were ignorant of all these things, our sanction
of them might, in some meas