a; and the West Indians at length perceived that they could no
longer resist the voice of the British people, when it spoke the accents
of humanity and of justice. The slaves would have met the dawn of the
first of August,--the day which all the motions in Parliament and all
the prayers of the petitions had fixed,--with perfect quiet, but with a
resolute determination to do no work. The peace would not have been
broken, but no more would a clod have been turned after that appointed
sun had risen. A handful of whites surrounded by myriads of
negroes,--now substantially free, and free without a blow,--must have
been overwhelmed in an hour after sunrise on that day, had they
resisted. The Colonial Legislatures, therefore, _now_ listened to the
voice of reason, and they, one after another, emancipated their slaves.
The first of August saw not a bondsman, under whatever appellation, in
any part of the Western Sea which owns the British rule.

The Mauritius, however, still held out, and on the Mauritius the hand of
the Imperial Parliament must and will be laid, to enforce mercy and
justice on those to whom mercy and justice have so long called aloud in
vain. In truth, if the case for instant emancipation was strong
everywhere, it was in no quarter half so strong as in the Mauritius; and
the distribution of the grant by Parliament to this Colony was the most
unjustifiable, and even incomprehensible. For, elsewhere, there existed
at least a title to the slave, over whom an unjust and unchristian law
recognised the right of property. But in the Mauritius there was not,
nor is there now, one negro to whom a good title is clearly provable.
The atrocious conduct of Governors and other functionaries, in conniving
at the Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, had filled that Colony with
thousands of negroes, every one of whom was carried there by the
commission of felony, long after Slave Trading had been declared a
capital crime by the law of the land, as by the law of nature it always
was. Sir George Murray, when Colonial Secretary of State, had admitted,
that at least thirty thousand of the negroes in the settlement were
nominally slaves, but in reality free, having been carried thither
contrary to law. He understated it by twenty thousand or more: yet on
all these negroes, in respect of property, were two millions and more
claimed: for all these the compensation money was given and taken, which
Parliament had lavishly bestowed. How then w