s half the West Indies
in the Colonial Office, though with an invisible sceptre. Talking
over the matter the other day, he said that he was well aware of
the consequences of emancipation both to the negroes and the
planters. The estates of the latter would not be cultivated; it
would be impossible, for want of labour; the negroes would not
work--no inducement would be sufficient to make them; they wanted
to be free merely that they might be idle. They would, on being
emancipated, possess themselves of ground, the fertility of which
in those regions is so great that very trifling labour will be
sufficient to provide them with the means of existence, and they
will thus relapse rapidly into a state of barbarism; they will
resume the habits of their African brethren, but, he thinks,
without the ferocity and savageness which distinguish the latter.
Of course the germs of civilisation and religion which have been
sown among them in their servile state will be speedily
obliterated; if not, as man must either rise or fall in the moral
scale, they will acquire strength, with it power, and as certainly
the desire of using that power for the amelioration of their
condition. The island (for Jamaica may be taken for example, as it
was in our conversation) would not long be tenable for whites;
indeed, it is difficult to conceive how any planters could remain
there when their property was no longer cultivable, even though
the emancipated negroes should become as harmless and gentle as
the ancient Mexicans. Notwithstanding this view of the matter, in
which my friend has the sagacity to perceive some of the probable
consequences of the measure, though (he admits) with much
uncertainty as to its operation, influenced as it must be by
circumstances and accidents, he is for emancipating at once. 'Fiat
justitia ruat coelum'--that is, I do not know that he is for
immediate, unconditional emancipation; I believe not, but he is
for doing the deed; whether he goes before or lags after the
Government I do not at this moment know. He is, too, a high-principled
man, full of moral sensibility and of a grave, reflecting,
philosophical character, and neither a visionary in religion nor
in politics, only of a somewhat austere and uncompromising turn of
mind, and with some of the positiveness of a theorist who has a
lofty opinion of his own capacity, and has never undergone that
discipline of the world, that tumbling and tossing and jostling,
which b