“Is sugar a commodity which we are simply desirous of getting cheap, without any regard to the country or methods of its production? If it be not, then is it clear as argument can make it that such commodity must be altogether removed from the operations of free trade? If it be, then by what monstrous perversion of equity do we control the methods of production adopted by our own producers? Why did we destroy that market in Jamaica which we now seize so eagerly in Brazil? The abstract principles of free trade are as manifestly violated by interference with production as by interference with exportation. If the doctrines of free trade are to find no exception in any suggestions of humanity or reason, then our Anti-slavery Act, and our Emancipation Act, and our vote for the African squadron, are all so many gross contradictions of a principle which we have formally sanctioned. Let those who think so speak out boldly. They have undoubtedly a clear case, if they dared but state it. Let slavery be considered as a practice which humanity condemns, and which civilisation must eventually abolish, but which cannot be permitted to enter into the calculations of a great commercial people. Let the coast squadron be immediately recalled, and the Bights thrown open to the sugar-growers of all nations to procure their labourers on the easiest terms. Let them make as much sugar as they can each for itself, and let the agency by which this article is produced be as much a matter of indifference as in the case of any other article, and _then_ may sugar fairly be subjected to the operations of free trade. If the West Indians then applied for protection, we might well repulse a petition for so obsolete a measure; but to take refuge in such abstract theories now is to blow hot and cold with the same breath—to preach up humanity from one side of the pulpit and economy from the other, taking care the while to appropriate to our own pockets the advantages of the latter doctrine, and to saddle our colonists with the expenses of the former.”