n acting wrong: let her not continue in error; and, at the
same time, let England meet and grapple with the question with enlarged
and liberal views--views that look to future times and future
circumstances--views such as England ought to entertain, and such as
Great Britain only can yet see carried into effect.

We first established cultivation in the West Indies by a population not
natives of the soil, but which required to be imported from another and
distant quarter of the globe. This, politically and commercially
speaking, was a great error; but it has been committed, and it would be
a greater error to leave those people, now free British subjects, and
the large British capital there vested, to decay, misery, and general
deterioration. They must be supported, and it is fortunate that they can
be supported, through their present difficulties, without inflicting a
grievous wrong on Africa, by taking her children from her by wholesale
to cultivate distant and foreign lands.

If European nations generally adopt the system of transporting labourers
as freemen from Africa, then Africa would continue to be as much
distressed, tortured, and oppressed, as ever she has been; while with
the great strength of slave labour which those vast and fertile
countries, Brazils, Cuba, &c., possess, they would, by the unlimited
introduction of people called free from Africa, but which, once got
into their power, they could coerce to labour for stated hire, overwhelm
by increased production all the British colonies both in the west and in
the east.

Such abstraction of the African population from their country, would
give a fearful impulse to an internal slave trade in Africa. The
unfeeling chiefs on the coast, the most profligate, debased, and
ferocious of mankind, would by fraud, force, or purchase, in the
character of emigration agents, drag as many to the coast as they
pleased and might be wanted; and while they did not actually sell, nor
the European, technically speaking, buy, the people so brought from
interior parts, these chiefs, by simply fixing high port charges and
fiscal regulations for revenue purposes, would obtain from the transfer
of the people--a transfer which these people could not resist or
oppose--a much higher income than they before received from the _bona
fide_ sale of slaves; and with which income they could, and they would,
purchase European articles from European traders, to enable them to
furnish additiona