but after a little wrangle this
project dropped. It was a foolish, useless motion, and deserved
no better end.

On Wednesday afternoon I found Downing Street thronged with rival
deputations of West Indians and Quakers, which had both been with
Melbourne. Out of Brougham's flaming speeches on Anti-slavery a
tempest has arisen, which threatens the West Indians with sudden
and unforeseen ruin in the shape of immediate emancipation.[20]
It is always easy to get up anti-slavery petitions and to excite
a benevolent indignation against slavery in any shape, and
Brougham has laid hold of this easy mode of inflaming the public
mind in his usual daring, unscrupulous, reckless style, pouring
forth a flood of eloquent falsehoods and misrepresentations which
he knows will be much more effective than any plain matter-of-
fact statements that can be urged on the other side. The West
Indians had no notion they were in any danger, and were reposing
under the shade of Government protection and in undoubting
reliance upon the inviolability of the great arrangement, when
they find themselves overtaken all at once with the new question
of immediate emancipation which has sprung up into instantaneous
life and strength. Their terror is accordingly great. They went
to Melbourne, who said he agreed with them, and that the
Government was determined to support them, and so they might tell
their people, but that he could not promise them to make it so
much a Government question as to resign if they were beat upon
it. The leaders of the Opposition equally took their part, but
the question is whether the tails will not beat the heads. I
never remember before to have seen any question on which so much
uncertainty prevailed as to individual votes. More than one half
the members of the House doubted, and probably are at this moment
doubting, how they shall vote. The petitions are innumerable, and
men are disposed to gratify their constituents by voting as they
please on this question, not caring a fig either for the slaves
or the West Indians, and reconciling it to their consciences to
despoil the latter by assuming that they were overpaid with the
twenty millions they got by the Emancipation Act.

[20] [Sir George Strickland moved, on the 30th of March, a
resolution in favour of the termination of negro
apprenticeship as established by the Emancipation Act
of 1834, on the 1st of August of the current year. The