The Sun.
London, England, 1825-07-29 00:00:00

[MORNING CHRONICLE.]

The Times of yesterday, in an article on the
slave population of the British Colonies, states—
" The excess of males in the Mauritius, by the
last Returns (so long ago as 1816) was frightful
—55,000 to 29,000 female ; the overplus of men
was an infallible consequence of an obstinate and
heartless prosecution of the slave trade, for the
end of extracting the utmost po.sible amount of
work from the labourer, of feeding no super-
fluous mouths, and of repairing the waste of hu-
man life, not by the encouragement of marriage,
and its consolatory influence, but by a repetition
of the same atrocious villainy through which the
victims soccessively destroyed had been ori-
ginally dragged to the sacrifice. This, thank
God, will be a reproach to us no longer."—We
wish we could echo the concluding sentence of
our contemporary. We are sorry, however, to be
obliged to state, on what we consider unques-
tionable authority, that the Slave Trade, in its
most odious form, is still carried pn at the Mau-
ritius ; and the knowledge whiCh our neigh-
bours, the French, possess of this circumstance,
goes very far to confirm them in the belief that we
are by no means so sincere in our determination to
abolish the Slave Trade as we pretend to be. We
are assured, that since the period stated by The
Times, upwards of seventy thousand. slaves
have been introduced into the Mauritius; and
that hypocrisy and . deception never were car-
ried farther than they have been on the part of the
Functionaries in that colony and its dependencies.
Slaves are notoriously landed on every part of the
island, where the nature of the .coast does not
render access impossible. But to prevent all
risk frPm capture by'British cruisers at sea, a
regular legalized Slave Trade is carried on .by
means of the Seychelles, small islands, depen-
cies of the Isle of France, situated nearer to the
coast of Africa, to which the slaves are first con-
veyed, and then conveyed to the Mauritius under
the denomination of old slaves. There is not
a prrsoa on the island who • does not know
perfectly well that the slaves are not old, but
they are old according to the papers, which are
fabricated.•ll not new, they have at most been six
months in the Seychelles, for the purpose of re-
moving, in some-degree, the extreme awkward-
ness of the unhappy beings on their first intro-
duction into a country, to the laugua'ge habits,
and employments of which they are strangers.
These fresh slaves from the Seychelles are often
advertised in the Mauritius Paper, and by some
strange oversight in those who have the manage-
ment of this illegal work,.in greater numbers than
the whole population of the Islands amounts to,
from which notwithstanding they are never missed.
Nay, so assured of impunity are those who carry
on this iniquitous work, that they even neglect
the precautions which one would suppose coin-
mon prudence would dictate. They even had
the temerity to advertise the arrival of these
slaves by their true denomination of Cargo for
Sale, in the same Paper in which such arrivals
of human beings used to be announced, by pub-
lic auction in the principal town, at 10 o'clock in
the forenoon. The -following is an instance on
the part of the Government Agent of the Sey-
chelles islands, whose wife was dispatched from
thence to the Mauritius to superintend the sale
of the cargo by the owners of the vessel in which
it was. transported, and also her husband's
agents.