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
You must be aware, by the course you are pursuing, you are losing the
sympathies of the popular mind. If you heed not what you are about, the
results of last Friday’s vote will materially impair your strength. You
are already quoted by men who have no interests in common with the
people; you are an authority in the mouths of Conservative statesmen: the
advocates of monopoly, and bloodshed, and death, for the former implies
the latter, tell us you sanction their proceedings, and smile
complacently on their resort to measures that can only derive efficacy
from the fact, that they are backed by the soldier’s sword. Religious
and peaceable men, as you are, with full faith, believing what reason and
revelation alike teach, that truth—mere truth—simple and alone, is
stronger than the iron arm of might, succumbs to no power, in heaven
above, or on the earth beneath, how can you, how dare you, give the lie
to the principles you profess, and ask the aid of government, which is
based alone upon physical force? Think you, by the bayonet and ball, to
ennoble your noble cause? Know you so little of earth’s history, as for
one moment to suppose that wrong ever became right, or that by the
employment of means which error has used with success, you can obtain
even the shadow of a gain for the sacred cause of truth?
Sir Robert Peel, the forlorn hope of rulers who have come into the world
a century too late, and who obstinately continue to oppose the advancing
stream, by which they will assuredly be swept away, has done you the
questionable honour of alluding to you, as on his side, in opposition to
the people’s friends. How he abhors slavery, he has shown in the
reduction he has announced in the duties on coffee, which employs
three-fourths of the slaves in Brazil. Will this be no stimulus to
slavery there? Or is the slave only the subject of your deep concern,
when he is employed in the cultivation of sugar? The editors of the
“Anti-Slavery Reporter” complain of being misrepresented, and blame Mr.
Cobden for blaming them, as if they approved of the government scheme.
But unfortunately you and the government have entered into
partnership—Sir Robert Peel helps you, and you help him. It is the firm
we find fault with. One member may not exactly approve of every thing
his partner does, but he must bear it as best he can. We learn “from the
ordinary channels of information,” as “they say in another place,” that
Mr. Barber is very indignant at the idea of being made a sharer in the
guilt of Mr. Fletcher, and his amiable accomplice, in the forgery of
wills. We doubt not but that your Committee can quite sympathise in Mr.
Barber’s righteous indignation. If they wished to avoid the charge of
hypocrisy, which may be fairly brought against the West Indian monopoly
party in the House of Commons, they should have acted as Mr. Barber must
wish he had acted—they should have refused to be made the tools of any
man, or set of men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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