When property in slaves is made but a precarious interest, dependent upon the slaves themselves, it is no more than the truth to assert, that a rigorous system of coercion, such as prevailed in the colonies some twenty years ago, would return. If it be argued, that this involves a contradiction in reference to the _contentment_, described as being the proprietor’s chief object to establish, let it be recollected that he is now in a dilemma. If he allows his slaves to accumulate earnings, they may be employed to his own _total ruin_; he has therefore to get, as speedily as possible, the utmost degree of work from his labourers that the law allows him. _Section 5._ INVIDIOUS FEELINGS EXCITED BY PROMPTING TO A GENERAL RUSH FOR FREEDOM. Several of His Majesty’s ministers, in various declarations and speeches, have alluded to the institution of slavery in ancient times; and availing themselves of the great experience thus presented for guidance and direction, have affirmed that the same measures of amelioration should be introduced to mitigate slavery in the West India colonies, which had in times past mitigated slavery in Europe. By obvious analogy, if the experience of times past be the true guide in measures relating to amelioration, the same experience should be the guide for measures relating to emancipation. Let us examine, then, if this be the case. In all ages and records of history, and in every nation on the globe in which slavery has existed, the difficulties of manumission have become less and less as civilisation advanced. But by the mode of operation laid down by Lord Bathurst, the difficulties in the present case must gradually increase. In a gang of one hundred negroes, the first man applying for freedom would have his relative utility to the plantation estimated at a small sum, the loss of the services of an individual not materially impeding its cultivation. But if thirty or forty men were to be abstracted from the estate, the sum to be assessed as relative utility must rise in a rapidly increased ratio, the remaining hands being wholly incompetent to render the fixed capital productive. Supposing, then, the measure to possess an executory principle: in the first year, according to its projectors, a man might procure his freedom at 100_l._ At the end of the second year, a man of precisely the same capabilities and abstract value would find the price of manumission risen to 150_l._ At the end of the third year it might rise to 200_l._; and so on, progressively, until it mounted to 500_l._, or a still higher sum. This is the operation consequent on the terms employed by Earl Bathurst, and subsequently, indeed, explicitly avowed by him, to illustrate the measure.