Now, with us all this seems very reasonable, and we are not a little surprised to find, as we certainly do, many intelligent and philanthropic men joining in the outcry against slave-grown sugar which the West India planters, those paragons of excellence and humanity, have had wit enough to raise, and which has answered their purposes remarkably well. We are told it is slave-grown. What of that? Half the Brazil slave-grown sugar is bought by British money, and refined by British skill, and then sold by British merchants all over the globe. Our cotton is slave-grown—tobacco, which yields a revenue of three million pounds and a half, is slave-grown. From the southern states of America and Mexico we import slave-grown rice, indigo, and cochineal; of the manufactures we export, half are of cotton, imported from the slave states, and upon their produce the millions of our manufacturing population depend for their subsistence. It would require no little impudence for any of the English monopolists to tell the Brazilians that we were so squeamish that we could not deal with them, because their sugar was slave-grown, when every one knows that our merchants gladly trade in and allow every one to have it cheap and good except our own hungry, wretched, and perishing poor. {35} They are to be taxed and fleeced to keep up the West India monopoly—their bone and blood are to be preyed on by the harpies that lust for human gore. That their desires may be gratified—that the value of their estates may be unnaturally kept up—that their vested rights, the rights of the robber and the pickpocket, if such a term can be applied to them, may be preserved—the English labourer, from a state of honest independence, is degraded into pauperism, dies in the parish workhouse, and rots in the parish vault. Shame on this Christian land, with its stately churches, its noble mansions, with its swarms of well-paid luxurious priests, with its peers of unrivalled wealth and power, with its sons boasting their royal blood—shame on such men, that for one hour they suffer so wretched a system to continue! It is well that they should talk of their love to religion and law, but the religion and law that connive at crying abuses and monstrous wrongs, can neither please Heaven nor bless man: they evidently are unworthy of the name they claim for themselves.