five years, to be as high as one in twenty-eight of the slave population; whereas, in the other eight colonies, from which we have Returns of the sales in execution, viz. St. Vincent's, Tortola, Bahamas, Nevis, St. Christopher's, Barbadoes, Dominica, and Grenada, and in which the prices are low, the proportion of slaves, so sold, is only one in sixty: and leaving out St. Vincent's and Tortola, which seem to involve some doubt, it is only one in eighty!

Is there not something in this singular fact, which unavoidably leads the reflecting mind to the presumption that, by the ordinations of a beneficent Providence, the rigorous exaction of servile labour, in despite of all the calculations of a sordid and heartless cupidity, may be expected to issue in the blasted hopes of the oppressor?

VI. LIABILITY OF FREE BLACKS AND PERSONS OF COLOUR TO BE DEPRIVED OF THEIR FREEDOM.

Barbadoes. The Deputy Provost Marshal, on the 30th of November, 1825, states, that when slaves are apprehended as runaways, they are confined to the cage; "and after they have been advertised in the public papers for ten days, they are sent to the common gaol and advertised again; and if no owner or claimant should appear, they are, at the expiration of three months, sold to defray expenses, and the surplus paid into the treasury, according to the act of the Island, but the latter very rarely occurs.' In the case of persons who are really free, it is of course very unlikely that any owner or claimant should appear; but this absence of claim, instead of being admitted as a proof of their freedom, which is the natural inference to be deduced from it, is made the ground for their being sold for the benefit of the Colonial treasury. The Deputy Provost Marshal adds, that he is "not aware that any slaves so confined ever claimed or established their freedom." Did he ever give himself the trouble to inquire into the facts of their history, before he consigned them to interminable bondage? If he did, let him give us those facts.

Jamaica. Many cases occur in this Island in which slaves, apprehended as runaways but claiming to be free, were able to establish the claim to the satisfaction of the magistrates appointed to enquire into the truth of their allegations. The following is a specimen of these cases.

Cuffee, alias James Hannah, alias James Hamilton, was born in St. Mary's, belonged to Mr. Samuel Hannah, who raised him, and took him with him to Scotland. He was there four years and a half as a waiting man with Mr. Hannah, who, having no further occasion for his services, recommended him to Captain Hamilton Maxwell, with whom he remained two years and half. He then went to Sir Robert Grierson, Rock Hall, Dumfrieshire, and stayed there two years and a half. He afterwards lived for some time in Edinburgh. He then engaged with Captain Simpson, of the ship Isabella Simpson, as steward, and arrived in Jamaica, in November 1821, when he was taken up as a runaway. The Justices very properly adjudged that this man was entitled to his freedom.

Many other cases are decided with an equal regard to justice. But in what a fearful predicament is the man placed who thus, without

a crime, or the allegation of a crime, stands exposed, on failing to prove himself free, though no one claims him as a slave, to the dreadful alternative of perpetual bondage?

But all are not thus leniently dealt with. Nancy Rider, a girl of sixteen, who appears to have had great personal attractions, was held in trust by a Mr.Johnston. A Mr.King offered to purchase her for his own gratification; but Mr. Johnston, being unable himself to execute a legal deed of manumission, arranged with Mr. King that she should be levied upon for taxes and sold, and that Mr. King should become the purchaser, on an understanding that he was to manumit her after he had thus obtained, from the collector of taxes, a legal title to do so. Nancy accordingly became the property of Mr. King, with whom she lived several years. They then quarrelled, and she, thinking herself free, left him. But Mr. King having omitted to fulfil his promise of legally manumitting her, availed himself of the omission to sell her,—while living openly with her mother to whose home she had returned and with whom she continued for some time to reside,-to a Mr. Hansbrow, who had become fond of her person. She, however, disliking Mr. Hansbrow for a lover, refused to submit to his desires, and asserted her right to freedom, grounded on the original stipulation between Mr. Johnston and Mr. King. Mr. King, on his examination, denied the stipulation, but admitted that he had at one time promised to free her, though he had stipulated no precise time for doing so. Neither he nor Mr. Hansbrow denied the other facts of the case. The decision of three Justices of the Peace, and nine freeholders of the parish of St. Ann's, on this apparently profligate transaction, was, that the claim of Nancy Rider is "frivolous, and not warranted by the circumstances of the case; that she is legally the property of Mr. Hansbrow, (he having purchased her of Mr. King, in whom the right of sale was exclusively vested,) and the Court, while it admonishes her to be obedient and submissive to, and scrupulously watchful of the interest of her master, as the safest and most likely way of ensuring his protection and kindness, trusts he will not permit his future treatment of the woman to be influenced by the occurrences of this day, but bury the same in oblivion." The Court which came to this extraordinary decision is called " a Council of Protection."

In the Parish of Westmoreland, on the 21st August, 1821," John Williams, a negro man, a pretended Curaçoa. No evidence of freedom produced. Sold from workhouse in January."

In the Parish of Port Royal, " Joseph Franks, a black, committed as a runaway 9th October, 1821; sold for payment of fees on 6th March, 1822, having no documents."

In the Parish of St. David, "John Paterson committed on 5th December, 1821. After due investigation he could not produce any document of freedom to the magistrates." He was sold accordingly on the 24th April, 1822.

In the Parish of Manchester," Eleanor Davison committed July 22d, 1824, being able to produce no document whatever, or to adduce any kind of proof of her freedom, was ordered to be sold according to law."

In the Parish of Clarendon, "Fanny committed May 31st, 1821. Sold out of the workhouse as a slave." "Allick Andrea committed December 27th, 1821. Sold out of the workhouse as a slave.”

This opprobrious state of law, where the slightest tinge of black blood is made presumptive proof of Slavery, in the absence of direct and positive testimony of freedom, and which constitutes the State a principal partner in this worst species of Slave Trade, is curiously illustrated by two cases occurring in Trinidad. We must reserve the details of these cases, as well as the inferences deducible from them for another opportunity; when we hope also to analyze the very important facts which are given in the same Returns on the subject of population; and which shew that, in what may be called, from its fertility and beauty, the garden of the world, the lives of its inhabitants, made bitter by hard bondage, are wasting at a rate which threatens eventual depopulation, and which converts that smiling land into little better than a charnel house.

ANTI-SLAVERY PETITION.

A Petition has been presented to Parliament from the Surrey AntiSlavery Society, which is a model of force and eloquence, and not more distinguished by these qualities than by its truth and justice. We recommend it to universal attention. It sets forth,

"That the population of our West Indian Colonies consists chiefly of Negroes, who are either unoffending foreigners, carried thither by force, or British subjects, born within the King's allegiance; that these unoffending foreigners possess rights under the Law of Nations which England is bound to recognize and uphold, as a civilized state, and for the violation of which, in the persons of other foreigners, a British fleet was sent only a few years since to lay the port of Algiers in ruins; that England on that occasion justly resented the barbarous practice adopted by the Algerines, of converting their enemies taken in war into slaves, as an uncivilized modification of the right assumed by savages of putting their prisoners to death; that British subjects, born within the King's allegiance, and innocent of all crime, cannot be deprived of their civil existence, and reduced to a state of slavery by any power known to the constitution of this country; that such a power necessarily supposes the annihilation of every principle on which the reciprocal claims of allegiance and protection are founded, and at once destroys the basis of the social compact; that such a power, if it could exist, might reduce to slavery all the born subjects of the king, as justly as any particular portion of them; that while in Rus sia civil death has been awarded as an appropriate punishment for high treason, and in Algiers slavery is substituted for the savage right of taking the life of a captured enemy, in the West Indian dominions of the British Crown unoffending aliens and unoffending British subjects are deprived of their civil existence by thousands, and hundreds of thousands, solely for the emolument of private individuals, who, for that purpose alone, by a monstrous and illegal usurpation, condemn their fellow subjects to a state of irremediable slavery, and extend the dreadful curse to their children, and their children's children; that the claim set up by the West Indian slave-masters to their fellow-subjects, and to helpless strangers, as their property, rests on no better basis than the claim of robbers and receivers to goods which they have stolen, or purchased knowing them to be stolen; that the crime of depriving an innocent man, whether a foreigner or a British subject, of his civil existence, immeasurably exceeds any one of those descriptions of theft for which the punishment of death is usually awarded in this country, as it includes them all; that it is one continned system of daily and hourly robbery, wresting from the miserable victim his natural liberty, his rights as a man, as a husband, as a father, his rights as a British subject by the constitution of his country, or as an innocent foreigner by the Law of Nations; that the crime is nothing less than that of robbing a human being of alt his mental and moral energies, of keeping his mind in darkness lest he should become acquainted with his rights, and of reducing him for all civil purposes to the condition of a murdered man; that the West Indian Negro, though born to all the privileges of a British subject, is allowed no inheritance but slavery; that if he attempts to assert his just claims he is consigned to the gallows or the stake as a traitor, on the principle by which pirates put to death those who do not quietly submit to their injustice, and thus natural death is added to civil death, and judicial murder to robbery in its most complicated form; to robbery momentarily repeated through a life of terror, of scourgings, and of mental and bodily degradation. The Petitioners beg leave to observe that these are no fancied horrors, but positive and admitted facts, and that they are here speaking of the sufferings of innocent aliens, whose privileges are consecrated by that Law of Nations which England has shed her bravest blood to maintain, and of British subjects born in the King's allegiance, whose rights have the same foundation and are as inalienable as those of every Member of the House; that the Petitioners, regarding the slavery of their fellow subjects in the West Indies as an outrage upon all justice, and sensible of the duty of put

ting an end, with as little delay as possible, to a system which is pregnant with such complicated evils, confide in the wisdom of the House for the adoption of such measures as may be necessary for the speedy attainment of that desirable object; but at the same time they beg leave respectfully to submit, that there is one measure which, while it is unquestionably safe, would also prove a most efficacious corrective of many of the immediate evils of Colonial Slavery, and might be carried into effect without loss of time; the Petitioners allude to the abrogation of the Bounties and Protecting Duties on Sugar; that these Bounties and Protecting Duties prevent Sugar, now become one of the necessaries of life, from being imported from various parts of the world, at a price so much below the Sugar from the West Indies as to make a difference to the British public of one penny per pound, or about one million and a half sterling on the aggregate annual consumption of the people of Great Britain and Ireland; that these Protecting Duties have now been in force twelve years, many of them years of great distress to the agriculturists and manufacturers of this country, during which the West Indian Sugar Farmers have received eighteen millions sterling for their Sugars over and above the price at which Sugars might have been purchased in the markets of England if the West Indian Planter had not been protected from the effects of fair competition; that it is from the forced and unremitted cultivation of Sugar in the comparatively inferior and exhausted soils of the British West Indian Islands, excited by the hope of high profits, that the sufferings of the Negroes chiefly arise, and that upon the showing of the planters themselves this forced cultivation is solely kept up by the artificial stimulus of Bounties and Protecting Duties, which impede the Commerce of Great Britain and operate as an oppressive tax on the public; that when the exhaustion of the soils, and the ruinous and expensive system of slave cuitivation and of non-residence, prevent the importation of Sugars from the West Indian Islands at the price for which they could be obtained from various parts of the world, the Petitioners humbly conceive that the West Indian Planters have no just claim to Bounties and Protecting Duties to enable them to continue an improvident speculation; that the Petitioners humbly submit that the Bounties and protecting Duties on Sugar, for the benefit of a comparatively few individuals, who hold their fellow-subjects in Slavery, ought not, in justice to the agricultural and manufacturing interests of this country, to be continued; that, next to British farming produce, Sugar is the chief article of domestic consumption, and ranks among the necessaries of life; that the effect of abrogating the Bounties and protecting Duties on Sugar would be, to transfer the cultivation of that article to the East Indies, and other places where it can be produced by the free labour of native farmers, and at little expense; that this transfer would tend to increase the growth of the proper food of the Negro British subject in the West Indies, diminish his fatigues, his privations, and his sufferings, and, by rapidly increasing the Black population, would so reduce the price of Slaves, and facilitate manumissions, that the Slave system would gradually become extinct, without violence or commotion; that the Petitioners, therefore, on behalf of the thousands of innocent foreigners, and of hundreds of thousands of their fellowsubjects, forcibly held in Slavery; on behalf of the people of England, whose rights and liberties are invaded in the persons of innocent Englishmen, denied that justice which ought to be extended with rigid impartiality to the powerful and to the helpless, to the black Colonist as to the white; on behalf of the King, nearly seven hundred thousand of whose natural-born subjects are wrested from the guardianship of His protecting hand within His own Dominions, by those who strip their Sovereign of the attributes of His Crown, and annihilate the Civil existence of a portion of His people equal in number to the population of a Principality; on behalf of the consistency and the credit of the Nation, whose cannon so recently swept the ramparts of Algiers, and dealt death to thousands on the African shore, that a barbarous people might be compelled to abstain in future from reducing into Slaves, not the subjects of this country merely, but those of all other European Powers, and to act on principles of which Britain is the public champion, and of which her West Indian Slave-owners are as publicly the unpunished and daily violators; on behalf of the suffering manufacturers of England, whose trade with nearly the whole of South America, with Mexico, with Hayti, with China, with New Holland, and above all with India and ber one hundred millions of inhabitants, is checked and stunted in its growth, because Protecting Duties and Bounties prevent those Countries from sending to England their Sugars in exchange for the products of British industry, and this in order that the Slave cultivation of the West Indies may be exclusively encouraged; on behalf of every virtue, and of every interest that is dear to Englishmen, the Petitioners implore the House to take into their earliest consideration the repeal of the Protecting Duties and Bounties granted to the cultivators of Sugar by Slave labour; that whatever difficulties the Slave Question may present under other aspects, the people of England may at least be delivered from the bitter consciousness of maintaining by oppressive, and unne. cessary premiums, a system of iniquity degrading to the national character, criminal beyond all other modes of robbery and violence, subversive of every legal and every constitutional principle, and equally at variance with the dictates of sound policy, humanity, and justice."

This, and all other publications of the Society, may be had at their office 18, Aldermanbury; or at Messrs. Hatchards, 187, Piccadilly, and Arch's, Cornhill. They may also be procured, through any bookseller, or at the depots of the AntiSlavery Society throughout the kingdom.

London; Bagster and Thoms, 14, Bartholomew Close.

No. 20.

ANTI-SLAVERY

MONTHLY REPORTER.

The "ANTI-SLAVERY MONTHLY REPORTER" will be ready for delivery on the first day of every month. Copies will be forwarded, at the request of any AntiSlavery Society, at the rate of four shillings per hundred, when not exceeding half a sheet, and in proportion, when it exceeds that quantity. All persons wishing to receive a regular supply, are requested to make application to the Secretary, at the Society's office, No. 18, Aldermanbury, and mention the conveyance by which they may be most conveniently sent.

SLAVERY AT THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE.

In the course of the last year an ordinance was promulgated in this colony, similar in its principle and provisions to that which has been established in Trinidad, for regulating the future treatment of slaves. It has generally been supposed in this country, that at the Cape of Good Hope the condition of the slaves was so mild as to call for no šuch interference on the part of Government. But it might have been assumed with certainty, that the accounts which led to such a conclusion were founded either in gross ignorance or in wilful misrepresentation. Slavery is an institution which, wherever it exists, must produce misery and degradation to all concerned in it; to the master as well as to the slave. Its effect in our West India colonies we are already familiar with. We shall hereafter be called to witness its still more horrid and revolting results as they are exhibited in the Mauritius. At present we confine ourselves to the Cape of Good Hope. Of the state of slavery in that colony, as it existed down to the month of January last, we are enabled to put our readers in possession of some authentic details which have been furnished by a colonist now in this country, on whose information we place implicit reliance. These details first appeared in the New Monthly Magazine for November last we have satisfied ourselves of their truth, and we give them with confidence to our readers.

"Cape of Good Hope, Jan. 5, 1826. "The mildness of Slavery at the Cape has been much dwelt upon by certain travellers, whose opinions on this subject, being re-echoed by the Quarterly Review and similar publications, seem to be generally admitted in England as perfectly just and incontrovertible. I am now satisfied, however, that the term, except in a very restricted sense, is altogether inapplicable. The general condition of slaves in this colony, compared with some others, (such, for example, as the Isle of France,) may, indeed, be correctly described as less deplorable: but with all its boasted alleviations, and in spite of every sweetening ingredient, slavery at the Cape is assuredly still a bitter and baleful draught.

"Should the comparative mildness of Cape slavery, however, be admitted, what a powerful argument does not this admission make for the