West India
discipline, ay, as essential, my Lord Calthorpe, as the freedom of the
press and the trial by jury to the liberty of the subject in Britain,
and to be justified on equally legitimate ground. The comfort, welfare,
and happiness of our laboring classes cannot subsist without it."

These specimens of the fierceness of abuse with which the Government
was assailed may perhaps prepare the reader for that last resort of
indignant discontent on the part of the governed,--the threat of
secession! Yes; Jamaica will break away from the tyranny of which she is
the much abused object, she will free herself from the oppression of the
mother country, and then,--what next?--she will seek for friendship and
protection from the United States! How soon this threat, if persisted in
and carried out into action, would have been silenced by the thunder of
British cannon, we need not stay to consider.

To this clamor of the opposition the more timid of the Anti-Slavery
party were disposed to yield, at least for a season. The Government
showed little disposition to press the improvements which it had
recommended. Mr. Canning seemed apprehensive that he had committed
himself too far, and was inclined to postpone, to wait for a season, to
give the West Indians time for reflection, before legislating further.
The chief advocate of the slave began to realize, that, of those who
had encouraged and cooeperated with him, but few, in a moment of real
difficulty, could be relied upon. But he was not to be baffled. "Good,
honest Buxton" had made up his mind that the world should be somewhat
the better for his having lived in it, and he had chosen as the object
of his beneficent labors the very lowest of his fellow-subjects,--the
negro slave of the West Indies. He was, moreover, a vigorous thinker
and an invincible debater, and, once embarked in this cause, he had no
thought of drawing back. So exclusive was his zeal, that at one time Mr.
O'Connell, vexed that the claims of his constituents were set aside,
electrified the House by exclaiming, "Oh! I wish we were blacks!" The
Irish orator had all along supported the Abolition cause, and spoken
words of good cheer to Mr. Buxton; but now his impatient patriotism
finds vent in exclaiming,--"If the Irish people were but black, we
should have the honorable member from Weymouth coming down as large as
life, supported by all the 'friends of humanity' in the back rows, to
advocate their cause."

Ther