Of the inadequacy of this compensation, however large it may appear upon paper, there cannot be a doubt. Enormous sums had been expended in the cultivation of the estates, in the building of works, and the transportation of machinery, all of which were jeopardied, and, as the sequel has proved, most frightfully deteriorated in consequence of the measure. But the public demand that slavery should cease for ever throughout the British dominions was peremptory; and, in pursuance of this laudable desire, the government of the day did not hesitate to adopt a course which will ever be a dangerous precedent; to “Wrest once the law to their authority: And for a great right do a little wrong.” “This frightful experiment,” as it was termed by Lord Stanley, then colonial secretary, was therefore decidedly of the nature of a compulsory bargain, forced by the people of Great Britain, no doubt from most praiseworthy motives, upon the holders of lands and slaves in the colonies. The terms of that bargain ought to have been adhered to by Parliament with the strictest good faith and scrupulosity. They had, on the part of the nation, expended a sum of twenty millions upon an experiment, the success or failure of which involved an amount of property which it would be very difficult to estimate, but certainly not short of two hundred millions sterling. The greater portion of this, be it remarked, was British capital, expended under the sanction and with the full consent of the British Government; and no one can doubt the fact that so large an interest as that was never before put in peril for the sake of any experiment whatever. Still it was made; and we maintain that the voluntary payment of the twenty millions gave the Government or people of this country no shadow of a right to depart from one iota of the bargain which they had forced the colonists to accept. The Act of 1833, which emancipated the slaves, also provided that, for six years more, they should remain in a state of apprenticeship, obviously for the purpose of preventing any violent outbreak, or an entire cessation of that labour which hitherto had been compulsory. The intermediate period, considering the risk which was incurred, was by no means a long one. It was not a boon to the planters, but a distinct condition, from which no consideration whatever should have induced the Government to swerve.