This presents an anomaly in the history of public measures, and it can only be accounted for by supposing that ministers, amid their many duties, have completely undervalued the importance of the measure now pending. This conclusion is confirmed by what is understood to be their language to independent members of the legislature whose suffrage they solicit in future discussion. They say the principal opposition of the West Indians is no more than idle and transient clamour. It is merely of a piece with what has been always witnessed. When the abolition of the slave-trade was under discussion, did we not hear the cry, that our ancient colonies would be ruined? That great measure was carried, yet no ruin ensued. When the Registry Bill was brought in, had we not a similar clamour, that the most dangerous excitement among the slaves would be the consequence? That point, too, was carried; yet no such direful evils attended it. Again, when the recent Amelioration Clauses were proposed, how furious was the opposition in the colonies,—the proprietors there were to be utterly ruined. Many of these clauses have since been enacted, even where opposition was strongest at the first, and yet no injury or change has taken place! What is the inference in regard to compulsory manumission? We have strenuous opposition at present, it is true; but when the measure is once carried, that will soon subside, and all the frightful features of danger which have alarmed the colonists will turn out to be mere phantoms of the imagination. Now, in answer, may we not allege, in the first place, that the objections urged against those former measures were not groundless. Our abolition of the slave-trade, without securing the effectual concurrence of foreign powers in a similar act, has transferred from British to foreign colonies the principal supply of Europe with sugar, and without the smallest benefit to Africa. The Registry Bills are an enormous tax on our impoverished colonies, and it is not to them we owe the extinction of our colonial slave-trade. Of our recent Amelioration Clauses, the effect in diminishing production is as yet more certain than that of increased benefit to the negro-population. In the second place, may we not pronounce that the case we are now submitting is very different from any of those cited? But in this age of superficiality, where all laborious investigation seems exploded, and when a well-turned period of declamation in Parliament sways the nation, let us take another mode of pointing out the difference of this case.