merely for the purpose of being offered as emigrants to the West India agents. A chief, or the representative of a chief, from the Bullom shore, or from the Timany country, may very well supply the West Indian agent at Sierra Leone with 40 or 50 emigrants, on receiving a bonus of 10 dollars for each. This would probably be looked upon as a bounty, well bestowed for the advantage of procuring so many labourers and as a small addition to the expenses attending their collection and transport; but the supposed bounty would actually be the price and purchase-money of so many slaves; the slaves would be presented to the Government superintendent as free emigrants, and the payment of their purchase-money would be an affair known only to the parties concerned in it. With regard to liberated Africans (as long as they continue to be located at Sierra Leone) and Kroomen, there would appear to be less necessity for requiring that they should have been resident for a year previous to embarkation; but I would still apply the same strict rule to all, making however a year’s service on board a British man-of-war (in the case of the Kroomen) equal to a year’s residence in a British colony. Such strictness in this case can hardly be regarded as needless scrupulosity. In dealing with this delicate question, I presume it will be desired not only to satisfy ourselves that we have taken every precaution for the prevention of abuse, and for the protection of the negro emigrants, but to preserve our proceedings from the possibility of exception, or even suspicion on the part of other powers; and cautiously to avoid every practice, however innocent in itself, which may be dexterously accepted as a sanction of abuses which we have been forward to censure and oppose. I may here refer to the long correspondence which took place between the Foreign Department and the Netherlands Government on the subject of the African recruits enlisted at Elmina for service in the Dutch East India possessions; and to the recent capture, by a British man-of-war, of a French vessel employed, under the sanction of her Government, in collecting negroes on the coast to form black troops in the French colonies on the coast of Africa and in the West Indies. In the first case it was evident that the bounty which was paid by the Dutch Government for each recruit, to the person who produced him, was actually the purchase-money of a slave, and our senior naval officer in the Bights very properly gave notice to the Governor of Elmina, that any vessel with such recruits on board, if fallen in with by our cruizers, would be captured and sent to Sierra Leone for condemnation; and if brought there I should certainly have condemned her; and in the second case, the collection of recruits for the French Government, owing to its being entrusted to private speculators and contractors, immediately degenerated into open and undeniable slave dealing. “In the papers which