J. Ewing Ritchie

“ Let the West Indian proprietor, then, take the degraded savage and convert him into a useful member of society, and in the same manner let the free-trader go and convert the slave-owner into an honest man. In both cases a restrictive policy has been found to be fraught with inevitable ill. It were time that they both should retire. Our aim should be to create in slave states a public opinion against the vile system that stains the land, and not to excite feelings of enmity against ourselves because we exclude them from our market, and seek to brand them as outcasts from society. ”

“ But let it not be for one moment understood that we consider slavery always will remain the curse and shame of humanity. We believe that it can be extinguished,—that it must be extinguished,—that, sooner or later, God’s sun shall shine every where upon the free, and that slavery shall remain alone in the dark records of earth’s misery and crime. ”

“ But whatever other means may be necessary in a time of profound peace to give effect to England’s interpretation of the law of nations, those means she will not surely hesitate to adopt, when her only other alternative is, retiring at once from a contest which she has long waged, baffled, beaten, and insulted by a set of lawless and outcast smugglers, or wilfully continuing to sacrifice thousands of valuable lives, and millions of money, with the full knowledge that the only result of her further efforts will be fresh triumphs to the slave traders, and the increased misery of their victims. ”

“ Brazil, the fourth foreign market we have, we are about to lose. Our artizans are overworked to raise annually four or five million pounds’ worth of goods, which are then taken, and, as it were, drowned in the bottom of the sea. What a man might have for once buying, the legislature, in its wisdom, makes him pay for twice. It decrees that a man must toil all day for that which he might otherwise have for half a day’s work. What admirable policy! Blessed are its effects, in the misery it has shed over the homes of our operatives—in the life-blood it has wrung from the labourer’s heart! ”

“ The Brazilian ambassador has been in vain endeavouring to effect a reduction of the duty imposed on foreign sugar. The reign of monopoly is to be continued yet a little longer. We are to go on throwing away our money, and losing our trade. The working man’s food is taxed out of all proportion. We may not use the cheap sugar of Brazil, which is imported—slave-grown as it is—into England, and, here refined, is then sold to the settler in Australia, or the emancipated West Indian labourer, for fourpence a pound. No, the unemancipated white labourer must pay a high price for his adulterated sugar ”

“ Let the legislative monopoly continue, and we shall not only peril our trade abroad, but our very existence at home, and England’s glory shall vanish as a dream. All that has been written by historians, and said by orators, and sung by poets, of a nation’s gradual decline and ignominious extinction, shall we realise in her hapless fate. ”

“ When the morning dawned on which the slave, the black, stepped forth unchained and free, praise and thanksgivings burst from the lips of others than the long-oppressed descendants of Ham. It was the triumph of humanity; and man, wherever he lived, and whatever his lot, could well be glad. ”

“ 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? ”

“ From the evidence given before the West African Committee, we learn, that wages average from two-pence to four-pence a day in our three settlements on the coast of Africa. The cost of the slave in Cuba or Brazil equals this. Let the experiment be fairly tried, and it will soon be evident that slave labour must be driven out of the market. That becomes still plainer when we look at the actual condition of the slave-grown sugar. From Cuba every fresh post brings a continuance of bad news. There is a want of capital and skill—a blight rests upon the land—property and life are insecure. ”

“ Experience, the great teacher of mankind, has shown in a thousand instances that in our efforts to put down slavery by restrictive policy and armed suppression, we have, at the most lavish expenditure of treasure and life, done nothing but create misery and ill-will. ”

“ Years have passed, and the people of England have not as yet reaped the benefit to which they were fairly entitled by the sacrifices they made. There is a monopoly in favour of West India produce, which deprives the working man of this country of an essential article of food. Slavery still remains, and, till that monopoly is abolished, will remain. Our abolition of it was regarded as an experiment by slave-holding states—an experiment which they now consider to have entirely failed. ”

“ The monopoly enables the West Indian planter to pay an unreasonably high price for labour, in consequence of which there is an importation of labour into the market—an unnatural demand is created. The high price the West Indian planter gets for his sugar, makes it answer his purpose to pay more for hire than his rivals can, and the consequence is, that the neighbouring European colonists are afraid to emancipate their slaves, knowing well, that directly they would leave them for the monopoly market, and they would be left without a hand to till the soil. ”

“ Slavery is a tremendous ill—an unmitigated curse; earth cannot produce its equal. Where it rears its hideous head, all that raises man above the beast, and makes life a thing to be desired, languishes and dies. ”

“ 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 slave-holder would, ere now, have been driven from the market—he would have stood before the world blasted in character and worth, had you never descended from the high ground on which it is given the advocate of truth to stand—had you never pandered to political factions—had you never given to party “what was meant for mankind.” ”

“ To those who are really in earnest in the cry against slave-grown produce, we say, that it is abundantly proved that the West Indian monopoly tends directly to keep up slavery. If that were abolished, we might expect to see slavery destroyed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Had this system been attended by any the smallest amount of good, we should have kept out of account altogether the last item in this part of our subject, to which we shall refer the reader—that of expense; but when we find the money thus squandered has produced no earthly good whatever, when all parties confess that past measures have ended in utter failure, and that the slave trade, so far from being put down in all its forms of abomination and cruelty, is more vigorous than before; it is but right that we should exclaim against the waste of money that has been so lavishly incurred. ”

“ Capital, the life-blood of industry, will never flow into a country till the capitalist has a pledge—a pledge no land of slaves can ever give—that the life he hazards, and the money he invests, are alike secure. ”

“ Several corporations and planters have given in reports favourable to the total abolition of the slave trade; it is understood these will be sent forthwith to the Spanish Government.”
The negroes have imbibed ideas of freedom which at no distant time will produce, by fair means or foul, a change in their condition. The planter already begins to perceive, that it is far better to be the employer of faithful and contented labourers, than the lord of men who feel their wrongs, and who wait but the first moment of revenge. ”

“ Does he not know that while the Committee were continuing in the old routine, the public mind had arrived at an opposite decision? Men have learned at last that slavery can only be destroyed by freedom; that given, the right to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest—and the employer of free men will soon be left alone in the field. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ay, these very men, and their connexions, who are loudest in their appeals against slave-grown sugar, have landing warehouses in Liverpool and London, and send their sugar to Russia, to China, to Turkey, to Poland, to Egypt ”

“ Considered as a question of revenue, it is extremely desirable that our differential duties on sugar should be abolished. The increased price we pay goes not to government, but into the monopolist’s pocket; he alone is benefited by it; the consumer pays 20s. a cwt. more than he otherwise would do to the grower of the favoured produce. Equalise the duties, and, as was exemplified in the reductions that took place in the duties on coffee, by making a decrease of price to the consumer, we get an increase of revenue. ”

“ If, under the system of slavery, labour had been as complete and productive as it ought to have been, if the negroes had employed the time to their best advantage, there is no doubt but they would have produced more than at present, when, in consequence of freedom, the fields have lost a third of their labourers. ”

“ From your costly clubs, from your glittering saloons, flushed with revelry and wine, you have gone to the House, and, in the fulness of your power and pride, declared that his hearth should be desolate—that the crust he gnaws he should earn at the price of his life—that misery and want, like attendant handmaids, should follow on his steps ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 p. 8past 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. ”

“ Indeed, the truth of this assertion was discovered even before the negroes were free; for no sooner did the planters feel that no effort of theirs could prevent emancipation from taking place, than they commenced to calculate seriously the probable result of the change, and to their surprise found, upon mature deliberation, that their expenses would be diminished, and their comforts increased, by the abolition of slavery. ”

“ We have merely withdrawn from the slave-market our demand for slaves. It remains for us to show, that economically as well as morally we have made a change for the better; that the labour of free men is more productive than that of slaves. By keeping up our monopoly we practically declare the reverse. We supply the slave-holder with his p. 11strongest arguments against abolition; and, by giving him an advantage over us in the markets of the world, we afford a stimulus to slavery itself; and thus commit what we profess to abhor. Slave-owners are not remarkable for a high moral sense ”

“ Were the duty on sugar so reduced to-morrow as to put it in the power of the working man to consume as much as he required, an impulse would be given to the production of sugar which would create a demand for capital—which capital would alone be safely invested where labour is free. With a plentiful supply of labourers, no one can deny that Jamaica p. 26would be a far more eligible country for the capitalist than Cuba or Brazil; and hence the slave-trade dealers would be thrown for ever out of the markets of the world. ”

“ The greater the risks the higher the profits; and there will always be desperate men—men who have nothing to lose—who will expose themselves to any dangers to win the gold they love. One successful voyage amply compensates for the sufferings and dangers they endure. Instead of having large roomy vessels, we have compelled the slave dealers to use vessels the most unfit in character, and destitute of the most necessary accommodation. ”