Thoughts on Slavery and Cheap Sugar: A Letter to the Members and Friends of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery SocietyRitchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
History
Thoughts on Slavery and Cheap Sugar: A Letter to the Members and Friends of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society
Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
Slave trade; Slavery; Sugar trade
This may be true of Jamaica, but it will not apply equally to other parts
of the West Indies, where labourers are needed; and Africa is the quarter
to which we must naturally turn for a supply. We find men in a state of
practical slavery—sunk in the lowest scale of being; and we maintain the
way to humanise them, to give them habits of industry and ideas of trade,
is to bring them into contact with the advanced civilisation of the west.
Thanks to the labours of the missionaries, they will find their
emancipated fellow-countrymen intelligent, moral, and religious men.
They will become subject to the same ameliorating influences—old things
will be put away, principles of good will be formed—the savage will be
lost in the advancing dignity of the man.
Let the West Indian proprietor, then, take the degraded savage and
convert him into a useful member of society, and in the same manner let
the free-trader go and convert the slave-owner into an honest man. In
both cases a restrictive policy has been found to be fraught with
inevitable ill. It were time that they both should retire. Our aim
should be to create in slave states a public opinion against the vile
system that stains the land, and not to excite feelings of enmity against
ourselves because we exclude them from our market, and seek to brand them
as outcasts from society. Not by such pharisaical modes of procedure
shall we obtain our end. If we would do a man good, we must teach him to
look upon us as friends, and not foes. We have no right to shut up a man
in his guilt; and, as a nation is but an aggregate of individuals, the
principles of action that obtain in the one case must be equally valid
with respect to the other. We heap contumely and scorn on the heads of
the American slaveholders, and refuse to do business with the merchants
of Brazil, and by such conduct directly deprive ourselves of what
influence for good we might otherwise have it in our power to wield. It
is time that we turn over a new leaf; that we act more in accordance with
Him who makes his sun to shine, and his rain to descend, upon the good
and the bad; that we speak in friendship to our fellow-man, however
degraded he may be, and win him over to the adoption of that which is
just and true. Experience, the great teacher of mankind, has shown in a
thousand instances that in our efforts to put down slavery by restrictive
policy and armed suppression, we have, at the most lavish expenditure of
treasure and life, done nothing but create misery and ill-will. It is
the part of a wise man to abandon a plan which he sees has entirely
failed. We may, by so doing, expose ourselves to the charge of
inconsistency,—the stupid sneer, the unmeaning laugh, of men to whom
experience may preach in vain, may be ours; but we shall have the
consolation, the sure reward, of men who, seeking that which will promote
the happiness of the family of man, when they find themselves in the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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