of estates in the West Indies were generally called) selected
that provision as the object of their most vehement remonstrances. But,
though they were not so open in their remonstrances against the other
clauses of the order, they did worse, they disregarded them; and the
stories of the ill-treatment of the slaves were neither less frequent
nor less revolting than before.

Fresh Orders in Council, avowedly designed as the stepping-stones to
eventual emancipation, were issued; and one which reached the West
Indies at the end of 1831 was, unhappily, so misconstrued by the slaves
in Jamaica, who regarded it as recognizing their right to instant
liberation, that, when their masters refused to treat it as doing so,
they broke out into a formidable insurrection, which was not quelled
without great loss of life and destruction of property. The planters
were panic-stricken; many of them, indeed, were almost ruined. The
colonial Legislatures,[227] which had been established in the greater
part of the islands, addressed the ministers with strong protests
against the last Order in Council; and the mischief which had
confessedly been already done, and the farther mischief which was not
unreasonably dreaded, were so great that the cabinet consented to
suspend it for a while; and the House of Commons made a practical
confession that the planters were entitled to sympathy as well as the
slaves, by voting nearly a million of money to compensate those of
Jamaica for their recent losses.

But out-of-doors the feeling rather was that the insurrection had been
caused, not by the unreasoning though natural impatience for freedom
entertained by the negro--whom Canning had truly described as
"possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect of a
child"--but by the slackness and supineness of the local Legislature,
too much under the influence of the timid clamors of the planters to
listen to the voice of justice and humanity, which demanded to the full
as emphatically, if somewhat less vociferously, the immediate
deliverance of the slave. The object, however, thus desired was not so
free from difficulty as it seemed to those zealous but irresponsible
advocates of universal freedom; for, in the first place the slaves were
not the only persons to be considered; the planters also had an
undoubted right to have their interests protected, since, however
illegitimate property in human beings might be, it was certain that its
existence