he Church of England? Let us at least keep
the debates of this House free from the sophistry of Tract Number
Ninety.

And then the right honourable gentleman, the late President of the Board
of Trade, wonders that other nations consider our abhorrence of slavery
and the Slave Trade as sheer hypocrisy. Why, Sir, how should it be
otherwise? And, if the imputation annoys us, whom have we to thank for
it? Numerous and malevolent as our detractors are, none of them was ever
so absurd as to charge us with hypocrisy because we took slave grown
tobacco and slave grown cotton, till the Government began to affect
scruples about admitting slave grown sugar. Of course, as soon as our
Ministers ostentatiously announced to all the world that our fiscal
system was framed on a new and sublime moral principle, everybody
began to inquire whether we consistently adhered to that principle. It
required much less acuteness and much less malevolence than that of our
neighbours to discover that this hatred of slave grown produce was mere
grimace. They see that we not only take tobacco produced by means of
slavery and of the Slave Trade, but that we positively interdict freemen
in this country from growing tobacco. They see that we not only take
cotton produced by means of slavery and of the Slave Trade, but that we
are about to exempt this cotton from all duty. They see that we are at
this moment reducing the duty on the slave grown sugar of Louisiana.
How can we expect them to believe that it is from a sense of justice and
humanity that we lay a prohibitory duty on the sugar of Brazil? I care
little for the abuse which any foreign press or any foreign tribune may
throw on the Machiavelian policy of perfidious Albion. What gives me
pain is, not that the charge of hypocrisy is made, but that I am unable
to see how it is to be refuted.

Yet one word more. The right honourable gentleman, the late President
of the Board of Trade, has quoted the opinions of two persons, highly
distinguished by the exertions which they made for the abolition of
slavery, my lamented friend, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, and Sir Stephen
Lushington. It is most true that those eminent persons did approve of
the principle laid down by the right honourable Baronet opposite in
1841. I think that they were in error; but in their error I am sure
that they were sincere, and I firmly believe that they would have been
consistent. They would have objected, no doubt, to my noble fri