What has followed since that period? The Slave Trade, instead of eight, has now lasted fourteen years. Far more time, therefore, has been allowed the Planters for completing their gangs, than was originally proposed by any one who did not avow himself a friend to the perpetuity of the Slave Trade. A far greater number of Slaves, also, than was then in any one’s contemplation, has since been imported. So far, therefore, the Islands are better prepared for the measure. But above all, it is now clear that we must abandon all hopes of bringing the colonial legislatures to consent cheerfully to the termination of the Slave Trade. Was it possible for the proposition to come before them, not only in a more acceptable form, but with a more gradual approach; and, if I may so say, at the end of a longer visto, than when it was presented to their notice by some of the most respectable of their own body, by men who had uniformly opposed the abolition in the British Parliament, and when they had, therefore, every reason to believe that the importation of Slaves would never be actually stopped until the measures, which were to make that importation no longer necessary, should have had, according to their own report, an effect so complete and satisfactory as to render the abolition no longer in the least objectionable; yet so strong are the prejudices of the colonists, that, even in answer to this communication, they frankly declared against abolition at any time and in any form. They intimate plainly that they look forward to the complete settlement of all the cultivable but now waste land throughout the whole of our West Indian islands.