o any man. I put my resignation into the hands of
Lord Spencer, and both spoke and voted against the Administration. To my
surprise, Lord Grey and Lord Spencer refused to accept my resignation,
and I remained in office; but during some days I considered myself as
out of the service of the Crown. I at the same time heartily joined in
laying a heavy burden on the country for the purpose of compensating the
planters. I acted thus, because, being a British Legislator, I thought
myself bound, at any cost to myself and to my constituents, to remove a
foul stain from the British laws, and to redress the wrongs endured by
persons who, as British subjects, were placed under my guardianship. But
my especial obligations in respect of negro slavery ceased when slavery
itself ceased in that part of the world for the welfare of which I, as
a member of this House, was accountable. As for the blacks in the United
States, I feel for them, God knows. But I am not their keeper. I do not
stand in the same relation to the slaves of Louisiana and Alabama in
which I formerly stood to the slaves of Demerara and Jamaica. I am
bound, on the other hand, by the most solemn obligations, to promote the
interests of millions of my own countrymen, who are indeed by no means
in a state so miserable and degraded as that of the slaves in the United
States, but who are toiling hard from sunrise to sunset in order to
obtain a scanty subsistence; who are often scarcely able to procure the
necessaries of life; and whose lot would be alleviated if I could open
new markets to them, and free them from taxes which now press heavily
on their industry. I see clearly that, by excluding the produce of slave
labour from our ports, I should inflict great evil on my fellow-subjects
and constituents. But the good which, by taking such a course, I should
do to the negroes in the United States seems to me very problematical.
That by admitting slave grown cotton and slave grown sugar we do, in
some sense, encourage slavery and the Slave Trade, may be true. But
I doubt whether, by turning our fiscal code into a penal code for
restraining the cruelty of the American planters, we should not, on
the whole, injure the negroes rather than benefit them. No independent
nation will endure to be told by another nation, "We are more virtuous
than you; we have sate in judgment on your institutions; we find them
to be bad; and, as a punishment for your offences, we condemn you to pay
hig