In the year 1834, the British parliament passed an act for the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies, her colonies in those islands being all of the slave colonies left to Great Britain. These colonies had dwindled into insignificance and formed but a very inconsiderable part of her gigantic colonial system. Canada, Australia, New Zealand and her possessions in the East Indies furnished an ample field for British settlement and colonial trade, which dwarfed into very diminutive proportions the British interests in the West Indies. Great Britain could therefore afford to be philanthropic and at the cost of £20,000,000 (about $96,000,000) she gave liberty to a very few more than 600,000 slaves, who were placed in a condition of apprenticeship for several years to enable the planters to accommodate themselves to the new order of things by degrees. She had abandoned the slave trade after, by the loss of the American colonies, she had ceased to have a large interest in the subject of slavery, and this grant of £20,000,000 for the freedom of all of the negro slaves left in her dominions, was the final atonement she made for the millions she had consigned to slavery, and the millions who had been cast overboard, to meet a watery grave, on their route to slavery. To make her own gracious act more conspicuous, she turned propagandist and commenced denouncing the system of slavery which she had been so instrumental in fixing upon the world, as un-Christian, inhuman and barbarous. Having, as she considered, cast the beam out of her own eye, she could see more distinctly the mote in that of others, but she made no restitution of the hundreds of millions she derived from the profits of the inhuman traffic as she now styled it, and which had assisted in building up her marine, manufactures and commerce. Having thus washed her hands of the sin, as she imagined, she became most intolerant in her opinions and denunciations of those upon whom she had entailed the institution of slavery by her avarice and power, furnishing another example of those, "Who compound for sins they're inclined to, By damning those they have no mind to."