SLAVERY AND ITS DEFENDERS. [From the Weekly Dispatch.]

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume IX, Issue 805, 20 April 1853, Page 4

SLAVERY AND ITS DEFENDERS. [From the Weekly Dispatch.]

It cannot be said of the English that they are blind either to their own faults or to the real virtues of their neighbours. No people have been so severe in their introspection— none have been so often unjust to tbe steiling excellencies of their own character. It is this discontent with what we are which moves us to strive after what we ought to be. If we are sometimes vain glorious, we are seldom self sufficient. The shower of letters which have appeared in the public journals ridiculing or vituperating the movement of our Peersses, at Sutherland Hocst, on die subject of slavery, come, *ye suspect, from the American embassy an f l the American Coffee house. They give us a low conception of the state of social progress and political morality in the model republic. It is too rare to see any class of society discharging Ua duties towards humanity, to enable us to afford to depreciate the humblest efforts in that regard. To behold our female nobility making themselves conspicuous in this cause — leading the van of the march of civilisation in the victory of philanthropy — shaming the rest of us out of our apathy — stepping from the delicate and elegant privacies of higher life, into the rugged stream of public and political conflict, from an imperative sense of duty and religious obligation — is a spectacle so striking as to convince us that the age has come when the highest and least dependent are sensible of those forces of public opinion which assure all that the more exalted tbe station the greater the call to adorn it by the graces of virtue and the fulfilment of every social incumbrance. Out of the mouths of duchesses and marchionesses speaks the very spirit of democracy, when women meet in public, and associate and combine to change tbe destinies of the race, and to demand, even from distant nations, the acknowledgment of the paramount claims of the miserable and the oppressed. We think they have interfered at the right time, and for the right object. We are not afraid that the movement may be misunderstood in America, or that it may lead to social heartburnings or misunderstandings. It is not to be mistaken. If its objects are perverted by those to whom it is directed, let the guilt of the perversity lie at the door of those who are not honest enough and capable enough to hear the exposure of their faults and to profit by tbe rebuke — albeit the truth be spoken in love. These worthy Englishwomen do not seek to move politically in this matter. They do not presume to question the right of the Americans to maintain " the peculiar domestic institution." They do not enter into the general controversy of the right of man to hold his fel-low-creatures as chattels. They do not join in the cry of the abolitionists. They set out from the common premises of both parlies. They assume and take for granted that slavery is to be — and do not even attempt to question the doctrine of such slaveholders as condescend to argue on the subject — that they found slavery and did not make it ; that finding it they had no remedy but to accept their destiny, that on an average taking of the standard of human happiness there is less misery and maltreatment among their slaves than among the labouring classes. The point at which our female nobility strike is in this — if there must be slavery, why not make it endurable ? Admitted that the " peculiar domestic institution" must exist why should it not be surrounded with and modified by the stringent protection of the law ? If slavery must be, why not prohibit the separation of parents and children, husband and wile ? Why actually compel slaves to be sensual, incontinent, mere brutes in the intercourse of hex ? Why debar them from reading or education ? Tbe Sutherland IJouse Address does not wrangle about the principle of slavery. It 3ays virtually if you cannot yet nJ of iluvi-ry, at ku&t you may

mitigate its horross — if you cannot consent to | resign so much property — if it be tco much to ask you to resolve upon your own ruin, by abolishing the only means by which you say your estates can be worked, or your incomes realised, surely it is reasonable to entreat you to place your slaves under the protection of the public law, and to recognise and vindicate for them rights which you cannot ignore without conspiring as a nation deliberately to embrute the very species to which you belong, and to dishonour a nature which, if you believe what you profess, you know that God has made but a little lower than ihe angels, and called to the divine honours of immortality. We are not disposed to dismiss with a sneer the just claims which the English people have to speak with the voice of authority on this subject. All honor to the magnanimous people | who long ago declared that whoso touches British ground is thenceforth and for ever free. That divine sentiment, practically enforced, establishes our claim to " teach the nations bow to live." Alone we have abolished the slave trade, and sacrificed many diplomatic advantages to induce other states to join in treaties to put down the accursed traffic. We yearly outpour blood and treasure to ciush this demon trade. We have mortgaged our industry, and burdened our property, to the extent of twenty millions sterling, to buy the freedom of our West Indian fellow subjects. Look at home ! Why, who have looked inwardly as we have done ? What sacrifices have we not made before calling on others to make any ? We confess we are keenly sensitive of my detraction of that magnanimous spirit of justice and humanity which is the great leading emblem of this our England. He who sneers at it or cams it down is recreant to his country, and blasphemes the virtues of his kind. No man can say of Britain that she outrages by her law either human liberty, social right, or the dignity of our common nuture. The proudest aristocracy in Europe, the most powerful territorial class of any country in the world, have just resigned their last prerogative of taxing the bread of labour an 3 the sinews of industry. Henceforth our laws are pure and spotless of human wrong. We are proud of it — we glory in it — we shall not patiently suffer the character to which it entitles us to be depreciated. The shower of letters, many of which the Times writes to itself, and eagerly inserts the residue, are rained on the public to help the journalist to maintain the monstrously false and unjust 'proposition, that the slaves who are deliberately poisoned with malaria in Carolina swamps, or " worked up" in cotton or sugar plantations in, Louisiana, are to be compared to our mechanics or labourers. The conclusive, the damning proof of that lie is to be found in the fact that our population increases at the rate of one and a half per cent, per annum, while that of the slave states is actually retrograde, having to be supplied by importations through slave breeders, to make j up the rapid losses of slave workers. We say, moreover, that if it were as true as it is false, it is a perversion of the most criminal sophistry to justify the miseries, the degradation, and the absolute embrutement imposed by the force of public law (and to which every citizen is an active consenting party at the polling booth) on the Ame» ricau negroes, and that social destitution and depravity to be found in old over-populated countries, which is directly the result of thfct love of liberty of speech and action which makes all men frer e?en with the penalty attached which results from the licentiousness iucident to freedom. That cant about charity beginning at home, from whom does it come ? Only from those who never do anything themselves, and are jealous of the merit of all who do. Look at home ? Pray what country in the world is so sensibly domestic as ours in everything that relates to the humanities of life ? Cruelty to animals even we will not tolerate. The whale kingdom is up in arms if a workhouse apprentice is abused. The mining and factory women and children are guarded by Act after Adt, and a standing commission. "There are ragged schools, houses of refuge, emigration funds—every conceivable means adopted of uplifting misery and relieving destitution. In a word, we will pledge our credit for statistics upon this one assertion, that, in proportion to the respective population of the two countries, there is at hast twenty times as much money, time, and labour devoted to active, useful, aiid efficient benevolence in England as there is in the United States, and our slaves are free, and their liberty honestly bought and paid for into the bargain. And even if we are not in a condition to make this challenge, we confess to the indignation with which we regard the unmanly taunts which " Polite Letter Writers" have aimed at the Stafford-house assembly ; because, whatever might be said of the general community, that fair sisterhood had been the foremost, as well as the most self-sacri-ficing, in their devotion to the charitable duties which lie nearest them. It is not among those who, in heart and spirit, assent to their beautiful, true, and touching address to the women of America, that governesses, or the meanest menials, are insulted or oppressed. It is rather among those who sneer at every exertion of others to do good to society, and who labour to conceal under the cant of the wiseacre the heartless laziness of the cynic, that will be found the domestic tyrant and the white-slave driver. Another effusion of heavy fudge revives the old stale dodge, by which the sugar-hogshead interest endeavoured to combine business with pbilanthrophy. " Academicus/' a cashiered colonial functionary, now a professor of history, who seems to think that nothing can be true that is not smothered in human dulness, and assumes that "Uncle Toms's Cabin" must be fictitious, merely because it is readable, furbishes up the venerable sophism of the sticklers for differential duties, that we should do nothing to alleviate the misery of the slave, until we have ceased to eat Cuban sugar, to smoke Virginian cigars, to wear Alabama cotton, or to feed our younkers on Carolina rice. That argument was once urged before, to keep up the protective duties in favour of our sugar colonies— and it was^ well answered at the lime by the free traders. " Not eat slave-grown sugar! Aud you, Joseph Sturge, say that with a slave-grown cambric neckloth round your throat — and you, Dr. Lushington, while taking a pinch of slave-grown bnull'— and you, Mr. Alexander, while paying over your bank couuter gold from slave- worked mines — anJ you, Lord Brougham, while the very heels of your boots are coppered from the Mexican sla\e-raised ore — and you, Lord Denman, who daily wash your hands with loap u.ailc liom se»l-boik'd Russian tallow !" Wiiy*

the greater customers we are of the slave Hates the larger is our influence with them, If we were to cease our custom, their ruin would only make tie condition of their slaves the worse. If we were to act on the principle here asserted, we would deitroy England that we might beggar America— a truly philanthropic proposition ! We could use no cotton—where would be Lancashire and Lanarkshire? No Russian tallow— where our soap and candle trade ? No Rutsian hemp or flax, or oil-cake— where our sails, ship-tackle, linen trade, cattle feeding ? Nine-tenths of the gold and silver in the world we would be bound to sink to the bottom of tlie sea, and a large portion of our cloth manufacture must be given up. In a word, if thit principle is good for anything* it is a call upon the people of Great Britain to annihilate their own prosperity for the express purpose of spreading* ruin and misery over every country with which our commercial relations are the most extensive ; and, to give its picture in little, the suggestion is, at the bottom, started by sordid knaves, to get a better price for their own free-grown sugar, their Ceylon coffee, and their East ludian rice and cotton. No. The Sutherland House Missionaries are true to their high calling. Their weapons art spiritual, not worldly. They appeal, not to the sordid interests, but to the moral principles of our nature. They seek to redeem the slave, not through the count-ing-house, but the conscience of his master : and we say that they have chosen the wiser, the more effectnal, as well as " the more excellent way." Here is their case, in the words of Henry Box Brown, a fugitive slave, extracted from a letter to the editor of the Sunderland News : — 11 There is no man, I care not who he be, black or white, has felt the loss of his wife and children more than I. 1 have borne the galling chains, the tyrant's threats ; and, more than that, I have seen my wife sold and bartered from one villain to another, and still clung to her and my children. At length a fatal hour arrives; my wife is sold off to a wretch, not to work in a cotton field or lice plantation, but, as she was handsome, for a purpose I cannot here name, but leave you and the public to judge. Bereft of my wife and children, and all the comfort that even the hapless slave enjoys, I obtained my liberty. I travel in the free States, and denounce slavery and slaveholders. I appeal to the public for assistance to buy my wife and children. I obtain the money ; I offer it ; lam refused. 1 raise more money ; I offer twice their commercial value, and the reply of their owners is — you shall not have them. I have tried, Sir, and others have tried, and the remorseless s'aveholder still holds her aud my children in bon 'age ; and before 1 left the States, behold my wife gave birth to another slave ; her master is», Sir, ita father !" The father bereaved, the mother desolated, the child robbed of nature's guardians, man embruted, woman dishonored, all by the deliberate public law of a civilized, and so-called Christian nation, call to us from the depths. Say — shall we answer them with a sneer — turn from our duty with a sophism — and crush the willing humanity of others with cant ? " Speak! strike! redress!"