_not import a single article_.[3] To provide against this evidently approaching crisis in the supply of sugar for the British market, we have thrown open our harbours to _slave-grown sugar_ from every quarter of the globe; and from the rapid decline in the produce of the West Indian islands, even before this last _coup-de-grace_ was given them by the application of free trade, principles to their produce, it is painfully evident that a result precisely similar is about to take place in the British colonies.[4] And it is little consolation to find that this injustice has recoiled upon the heads of the nation which perpetrated it, and that the decline in the consumption of British manufactures by the West India islands is becoming proportioned to the ruin we have inflicted on them.[5] But most of all has this concatenation of fanaticism, infatuation, and injustice proved pernicious to the negro race, for whose benefit the changes were all undertaken. Happy would it have been for them if the British slave trade had never been abolished; that they had crossed the Atlantic chiefly in Liverpool or Glasgow slave-ships, and been brought to the British West India islands! For then the slave trade was subject to our direction, and regulations might have been adopted to place it on the best possible footing for its unhappy victims. But _now_ we have thrown it entirely into the hands of the Spaniards and Portuguese, over whom we have no sort of control, and who exercise it in so frightful a manner that the heart absolutely sickens at the thought of the amount of human suffering, at the cost of which we have reduced the price of sugar to sixpence a pound. Compared with it, the English slave-ships and English slavery were an earthly paradise. Mr Buxton, the great anti-slavery advocate, admitted, some years ago, that the "number of blacks who now annually cross the Atlantic, is _double what it was_ when Wilberforce and Clarkson first began their benevolent labours."[6] _Now_, under the fostering influence of free trade in sugar, it may reasonably be expected that in a few years _the whole_, or nearly the whole sugar consumed by Europe, will be raised by the slave colonies, and wrung by the lash from the most wretched species of slaves--those of Cuba and Brazil! Moreover, the slave trade, to supply them, will be _triple_ what it was in 1789, when the movement in favour of the negro population began! Thus, by the combined effects of fanaticism, ignorance, presumption, and free trade, we shall have succeeded, by the middle of this century, in totally destroying our own sugar colonies; adding, to no purpose, twenty millions to our national debt; annihilating property to the amount of £130,000,000 in our own dominions; doubling the produce of foreign slave possessions; cutting off a market of £3,500,000 a-year for our manufactures: and tripling the slave trade in extent, and quadrupling it in horror, throughout the globe.