with the Duke of Gloucester in the chair. The Edinburgh Review
described his speech as "a display of eloquence so signal for rare and
matured excellence that the most practised orator may well admire how it
should have come from one who then for the first time addressed a public
assembly."

Those who know what the annual meeting of a well-organised and
disciplined association is, may imagine the whirlwind of cheers which
greeted the declaration that the hour was at hand when "the peasant of
the Antilles will no longer crawl in listless and trembling dejection
round a plantation from whose fruits he must derive no advantage, and
a hut whose door yields him no protection; but, when his cheerful and
voluntary labour is performed, he will return with the firm step and
erect brow of a British citizen from the field which is his freehold to
the cottage which is his castle."

Surer promise of aptitude for political debate was afforded by the skill
with which the young speaker turned to account the recent trial for
sedition, and death in prison, of Smith, the Demerara missionary; an
event which was fatal to Slavery in the West Indies in the same degree
as the execution of John Brown was its deathblow in the United States.
"When this country has been endangered either by arbitrary power or
popular delusion, truth has still possessed one irresistible organ, and
justice one inviolable tribunal. That organ has been an English press,
and that tribunal an English jury. But in those wretched islands we
see a press more hostile to truth than any censor, and juries more
insensible to justice than any Star Chamber. In those islands alone
is exemplified the full meaning of the most tremendous of the curses
denounced against the apostate Hebrews, 'I will curse your blessings.'
We can prove this assertion out of the mouth of our adversaries. We
remember, and God Almighty forbid that we ever should forget, how,
at the trial of Mr. Smith, hatred regulated every proceeding, was
substituted for every law, and allowed its victim no sanctuary in the
house of mourning, no refuge in the very grave. Against the members of
that court-martial the country has pronounced its verdict. But what is
the line of defence taken by its advocates? It has been solemnly and
repeatedly declared in the House of Commons that a jury composed
of planters would have acted with far more injustice than did this
court;--this court which has never found a single lawyer to