“It appears, therefore, that for our £400,000 paid in 1817 we have got four treaties, under which the supply of the Spanish colonies with slaves has gone on as regularly as that of any other article of commerce, increasing and diminishing with the demand for them; that in the mean time we have, as slave-catchers for them, handed over to their tender mercies several thousand emancipados at the Havanna, who are a degree worse off than the slaves themselves; and our consul having contrived an ingenious plan to get back some of these poor people, has had his ‘exequatur’ withdrawn, and turned out of the colony. “On the separation of Brazil from Portugal, negotiations were entered into to induce the Brazilian government to abandon the slave trade; and, in 1826, a treaty was entered into declaring it piracy, after 1830, when a mixed British and Brazilian court were to adjudicate on seizures. The greatest exertions were used to import slaves from the date of this treaty, and the vessels were consequently much more crowded than usual; yet, out of 150,587 slaves legally imported into Rio Janeiro between the 1st July, 1827, and 31st December, 1830, when it became a smuggling trade, the mortality on the middle passage was _only eight per cent._ In 1831, the trade still going on, Don Pedro issued a decree, declaring all slaves brought into Brazil FREE. In 1835, a new treaty was entered into with Great Britain, similar to the Spanish one of the same date, which the Brazilian legislature refused to ratify then, and repeated the refusal in 1840.” “The result of our treaty-making with Brazil, according to the source of information, the Parliamentary Papers A and B, has been an increase in the extent of her trade, accompanied with an increase in the cruelty with which it is carried on; the mortality being raised on the middle passage from 8 per cent. in 1830, to 25 per cent. in 1840.”—(Buxton, p. 174.) In the mean time our cruisers have captured some thousand negroes; and “every account received from Brazil of the state of the negroes, who had been _nominally_ emancipated by sentence of the mixed commission courts, shows that in reality they have continued to be slaves.”—(Bandinell, p. 235.) As the vessels bearing Portuguese, Spanish, and Barbarian flags, are the only ones employed in the conveyance of slaves from America within the tropics, it is hardly necessary to allude to the treaties which Government has, with a praiseworthy pertinacity, concluded with other countries that never had any slave trade at all. For the same reason we pass by those entered into with the enlightened chiefs who rule on the coasts and rivers of Africa, and whose sanction has been purchased by _scarlet_ coats, _cocked_ hats, and _plush unmentionables_. The conclusion of the whole matter is, that our treaties have been in vain. We are as far from the desired end as ever.