hen slavery is at an end.
The slaveholders see this most clearly; they see that while you allow
these slaves to be their _property_, you act inconsistently and
oppressively in intermeddling, as you propose to do, with what is theirs
as much as any other of their goods and chattels: you must proceed,
therefore, in your measures for amelioration, as you call it, with
'hesitating steps and slow;' and there is nothing you can do for
restraining punishment, for regulating labor, for enforcing manumission,
for introducing education and Christianity, which will not be met with
the remonstrance, undeniably just by your own concessions, that you are
encroaching on the sacred rights of property,--the slaveholders see all
this, and they can employ it to paralyse and defeat all your efforts to
get at emancipation, and to prepare for it. It is on this account, that
I wish it settled in your minds, as a fixed and immutable principle,
that there is and can be no property of man in man. Adopt this
principle, and give it that ascendency over your minds to which it is
entitled;--and slavery is swept away.--_Speech of Rev. Dr Thomson of
Edinburgh._

[O] The history of the Revolution in St Domingo is not generally
understood in this country. The result of the instantaneous emancipation
of the slaves, in that island, by an act of the Conventional Assembly of
France in the month of February, 1794, settles the controversy between
the _immediatists_ and _gradualists_. 'After this public act of
emancipation,' says Colonel Malenfant, who was resident in the island at
the time, 'the negroes _remained quiet_ both in the South and in the
West, and _they continued to work upon all the plantations_.' 'Upon
those estates which were abandoned, _they continued their labors_, where
there were any, even inferior agents, to guide them; and on those
estates, where no white men were left to direct them, they betook
themselves to the planting of provisions; but upon _all the plantations_
where the whites resided, the blacks _continued to labor as quietly as
before_.' 'On the Plantation Gourad, consisting of more than four
hundred and fifty laborers, _not a single negro refused to work_; and
yet this plantation was thought to be under the worst discipline and the
slaves the most idle of any in the plain.' General Lacroix, who
published his 'Memoirs for a History of St Domingo,' at Paris, in 1819,
uses these remarkable words: 'The colony marched, _as by enchant