With these few remarks, gentlemen, the writer would commend the Thoughts on Slavery and Cheap Sugar to your most attentive perusal. The subject is of no common importance. If you are wrong, you are altogether wrong, and are a curse instead of a blessing—a curse to the slaves abroad—a curse to the negro on the coast of Africa, who is now murdered when he was before sold as a slave, and whom we would civilise and christianise by transporting to the untilled fields of Jamaica { 7}—a curse to the labourer at home, whose wretched existence you help to render more wretched still. Well may you shudder as you think of the responsibility you incur. Consider well your present course—momentous interests are at stake. Let your decision be calm and unprejudiced—not given in deference to well-meaning and respectable men—not from any uneasy sensation of annoyance or ill-will, but such as will be in accordance with the light you have. Your cause is a popular one, and you must be in a false position when you find yourselves opposed to the popular will. This one fact of itself ought to excite suspicion. Advocating as you do the rights and dignity of man, you and the creatures and champions of a fictitious aristocracy can have no common ground, and can never be found on a common side. To be amongst such men at all, you must have drifted from your moorings. Look well to it that you rectify this error in time.
One word about the pamphlet. It is written with no reference whatever to the government scheme. It is hardly worth while to attack a measure which surely your Committee will not defend—a measure which will merely drive slave-grown sugar from one market to another—a measure which opens the door abundantly to fraud, and to those immoralities with which fraud is always accompanied. The writer’s object has been to show that our past mode of procedure has not destroyed slavery;—that the adopting the principles of free-trade alone can do this; and that such a course would be a great national boon. All he aims at is the truth; and he should be happy to stand corrected when in the wrong.
That you, gentlemen, may calmly and seriously consider the momentous question discussed in these pages, and that the valuable Society, which has so many claims on your regard, may continue to exist and act with increasing power, till slavery be abolished, is the sincere wish and prayer of