y to ensue, from these
sacrifices--whether we shall run the risk of losing the benefit of
those sacrifices, and tarnishing for ever that glory, by admitting to
the British market sugar the produce of foreign slavery." * * * "If
you admit it, it will come from Brazil and Cuba. In Brazil, the
slave-trade exists in full force; in Cuba, it is unmitigated in its
extent and horrors. The sugar of Cuba is the finest in the world; but
in Cuba, slavery is unparalleled in its horrors. I do not at all
overstate the fact, when I say, that 50,000 slaves are annually landed
in Cuba. That is the yearly importation into the island; but, when you
take into consideration the vast numbers that perish before they leave
their own coasts, the still greater number that die amidst the horrors
of the middle passage, and the number that are lost at sea, you will
come to the inevitable conclusion, that the number landed in
Cuba--50,000 annually--is but a slight indication of the number
shipped in Africa, or of the miseries and destruction that have taken
place among them during their transport thither. If you open the
markets of England to the sugar of Cuba, you may depend on it that you
give a great stimulus to slavery, and the slave-trade." Sir Robert
Peel then pointed out peculiar and decisive distinctions between the
case of sugar, and that of cotton, tobacco, and coffee; that, though
all of them were the produce of slave labour--First, we cannot now
reject the _cotton_ of the United States, without endangering to the
last degree the manufacturing prosperity of the kingdom. Secondly, of
all the descriptions of slave produce, sugar is the most cruelly
destructive of human life--the proportion of deaths in a sugar
plantation being infinitely greater than on those of cotton or coffee.
Thirdly, slave grown sugar has _never_ been admitted to consumption in
this country.[13] He also assigned two great co-operating reasons for
rejecting slave-grown sugar:--"That the people of England required the
great experiment of emancipation to be fairly tried; and they would
_not_ think it fairly tried, if, at this moment, when the colonies
were struggling with such difficulties, we were to open the floodgates
of a foreign supply, and inundate the British market with sugar, the
produce of slave-labour;" adopting the very words of the Whig
Vice-President of the Board of Trade, Mr Labouchere, on the 25th June
1840. The other reason was, "that our immense possession