Gentlemen who clamoured for emancipation, in this way is the sugar which you are daily consuming made! You would not have it when produced by slaves in your own colonies, and under the humane protection of your own overruling laws; you are content to take it now—at the instigation of Mr Cobden and his confederates, without the slightest scruple or remorse for having ruined thousands of your countrymen—because you can have it cheaper through the sweat and the life-blood of the slave! Is this morality? Is it justice? Is it even—to descend to lower motives—wisdom? Can you not see before you the time when, after the West Indian colonies are abandoned, a gigantic monopoly will accrue to the slave-growing states, and the sugar, for the paltry saving on which article all has been sacrificed, again become as dear, possibly much dearer than before? Recollect it is not an article like wheat, or any common species of food, which can be reared upon every soil. There is but one region of the earth in which it can be grown, and even there it cannot be grown profitably, except through a large expenditure of capital, and by means of an almost limitless command of labour. Cuba and Brazil _have_ both. Our colonies _had_ both in sufficiency, until, by cutting off the one, you almost annihilated the other. Go one step further, or rather continue in the course you have begun a very little longer, and the capital of the West Indian colonies will be wholly and irretrievably dissipated. Irretrievably—for, after what has passed, it is in vain to think that any British subject will again embark his capital in such a trade, with no better security than that of our fiscal laws, fluctuating every year under the influence of short-sighted agitation, and regulated by men whose sole intelligible principle is the continued possession of power. Once let our colonies be annihilated—their capital of nearly two hundred millions be swallowed up, principal and interest—their market, which took from us annually three millions and a half of British manufactures, closed—and the inevitable result will be a monopoly of sugar to the slave-growing states, high prices, and in all probability, which the bullionists ought to consider, a perpetual drain of gold.