The Sun.
London, England, 1841-05-27 00:00:00

BRAZIL SUGAR AND BRAZIL
GOLD.

COPY OF A LETTER TO VISCOUNT MELBOURNE ON THE

SUGAR QUESTION.

MY LORD,—The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery So-
ciety has forwarded your Lordship a strong remonstrance,
dated the 26th March last, against the admission of Bra-
zil sugars, because produced by the legal slave labour of
that country, although it would greatly relieve the com-
munity and extensively benefit the manufacturing, com-
mercial, anil shipping interests and the revenue.
Mr. Henry Tuckett, of 7, South-street, Finsbury, the
Chairman of the Anti-Slavery Committee, a philanthro-
pic quaker, signed the document in behalf of the Commit-
tee, yet he is a large slave holder, whose gold produce is
imported five or six times a year into this kingdom
from Brazil duty free !—a fair sample of the interested
hypocrisy of patriotic benevolence !
Mr. Joseph John Gurney, banker, of Norwich, and;
until these -few days, Treasurer of the British and Anti-
Slavery Society, is another of those philanthropic qua-
kers who is agitating the world on this subject, and hold-
ing up to universal execration and abhorrence all who
legally inherit slaves in the United States (as English-
men did formerly), and yet this benevolent gentleman is
a large slave owner in the Imperial Brazilian Mining As-
sociation, whose produce also comes in duty free !
Durins the last sixteen years, these merciful, benign,
and charitable men have committed several thousand fe-
lonies by buying and working as many slaves, with no
object in v'ew but mercenarily to secure a large interest
on their investments, although liable to transpoi Lation
for each offence. They have no objection to our re-
ceiving c0i,,,0n, coae and innumerab29other articles,
the produce of sir re-labour, but the admission of Brazil
sugars would le, sen the profits of their Wes, India pos-
sessions, be useful to the community, interfere with
their misplaced clamour about slavery, and render the
present Ministers deservedly popular with the greater
portion of society, and therefore these things the; must
of course oppose !
In 1824 the law justly declared every Englishma?' a
felon who should thenceforward purchase a slave, ever
through an agent. In 1825, the year following, that
great philanthropist, Mr. Joseph Fry, and many of his
benevolent Quaker and other friends, got up a Company,
.vhich they called the Imperial Brazilian Mining Asso-
ziation. The object was to buy several hundred slaves.
who were bought, and to form an extensive slave colony
in the interior of the Brazils, which was quickly accom-
plished, out of the reach of the law of England, for work-
ing gold mines. They forgot that they remained within
the reach and operation of the said law to answer for
their nefarious proceedings.
The Company was immediately formed, the shares
eagerly bought up, for the greater part by anti-slavery
Quakers and other very opulent and anti-slavery men,
and the following were chosen and have circr since acted
as the Directors, with three exceptions Josh as Walker,
chairman; Timothy Abraham Curtis, a Director of the
Bank of England ; Thomas Gibson, Isaac Lyon Gold-
smid. George Lewis Hollingsworth. John Shore. Thos.
Stokes, Michael Williams, copper-merchant, Theme:-
street ; John Wray, Fellow of the Horticultural Society;
Joseph Fry, banker, a banks apt ; William Plaxton All-
cock, deceased; and Edward Oxenford, removed, but now
a Director in the National Brazilian Mining Association,
which Company has also purchased many hundred slaves,
now working at their gold mines in the Brazils. The
Solicitors to the Imperial Brazilian Mining Association
are Messrs. Freshfield, slaveowners rid solicitors to the
Bank of England, and their Chief Commissioner at the
mines is a George Vincent Duval, Director, on absence,
of the Saint John d'El Rey Slave Mining Company,
who, like many other English Mining Companies, have
bought many hundreds of slaves.
In the last seventeen numbers of the " British and
Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter" I have laid a full expo-
sition of all these matters before the public, which the
Directors of the Imperial Brazilian Mining Association,
in their various replies, have admitted, and which shows
that the enormities practised upon the slaves by the said
Association surpass the worst periods of West India
depravity.
These discussions have created such a sensation
amongst the anti-slavery party all over the kingdom,
that a meeting of the shareholders of the Imperial Brazi-
lian Mining Association was called on the 15th inst., to
take the present crisis of their affairs into consideration,
in opposition to the wish of the Directors ; and although
between one and two hundred of the proprietors of stock
attended, only seven supported a motion for giving free-
dom to their slaves, yet • a large portion of the whole are
philanthropic quakers ! •
The day previously, the annual meeting of the British
and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was held at Exeter
Hall, and one of the speakers, a quaker, in addressing
the assembly, very emphatically observed, " I very much
regret that on one point to which the Committee have
directed their attention, that of the Minin2 Associations
in foreign countries, their efforts have not been attended
Kith greater success. British merchants of high strnd-
ing and reputation still implicate themselves in the guilt
of murder—murder of the blackest character—for the
sake of filling their pockets with gold ! Should these
remarks reach the ears of those involved in it, they will
be heard by many very intimate friends of my own (the
Thomas's, and Tuckett's, and Fry's of Bristol, and hun-
dreds besides), and I shall not rev et it."
It is my intention to present a petition to the Legisla-
ture, detvging all these facts, and praying that the At-
torney-General be instructed to proceed criminally
against the Directors of these numerous Slave Associa-
tions, unless your Lordship conceives it more appropriate
that such instructions should emanate directly from the
G over ment. _ _

I have the honour to be, my Lord,
Your Lordship's most obedient servant,
May 24th, 1841. F. A. KENTISH.

SPIRIT of. the PUBLIC JOURNALS.

FROM THE DAILY PAPERS OF YESTERDAY.

STANDARD.—Ministers have been uniformly de-
feated in the House of Commons through the
whole present Session, and frequently in former Ses-
sions. They have been for six years barely endured
by the House of Lords—and they are still Ministers.
They say that they will dissolve or resign if defeated
on the Corn-law question. -Why, they said the
same thing last year with reference to Lord Stanley's
Bill upon which they were defeated—and the year be-
fore they went through a concerted farce of resigna-
tion upon the Jamaica Bill. They would not resign
if defeated on the Corn-law question, though they
would necessarily dissolve in the summer, as an excuse
for huddling over the business of the session, and secur-
ing six months of salary and patronage. Nothing but
such a motion as Sir Robert Peel's can get them
out, or postpone the inconvenience of a dissolution.
But it is said that even if Sir Rohert Peel's motion be
carried Ministers will not resign, and the conduct in 1784
of Mr. Pitt, who retained office in defiance of adverse
votes,is quoted as a decisive precedent.We long since antici-
cipated the use that would be made of this precedent,
and showed how fiercely it had been condemned by the
Whigs of 1784, the Whigs of 1807, and the Whigs of
1835. Let us, however, compare the cases. Mr. Pitt
was, in 1784, an untried Minister, and the opposition to
him was a direct infringement of the prerogative
of the Crown. Lord Melbourne has had a
six years' trial. Mr. Pitt was the chosen Minister
of the Crown and the House of Lords. Lord Mel-
bourne is not the chosen Minister of the House of
Lords, and there is no proof that he is the chosen Mi-
nister of the Crown. The House of Commons against
which Mr. Pitt had to contend was chosen under the ad-
ministration of his antagonists. Lord Melbourne has
been condemned by his own House of Commons. The
majorities against Mr. Pitt were 8, 14, and at the highest
20. Lord Melbourne has been beaten in his own House
of Commons, by a majority of thirty-six. Never-
theless—and this is the great point of constitutional dif-
ference—Mr. Pitt appealed to the people within two
months from his first defeat, and would have appealed at
once, but for an address from the Commons to the
Crown, deprecating. a dissolution, and intimating a pro-
mise of good behaviour. In contrast, Lord Melbourne
has not dared to appeal to the people through successive
years of defeat, though no objection to such an appeal
has been offered by Parliament.
COURIER—In accordati.ce with the tactics of Minis-
ters in Parliament, their retainers out of doors and in the
pro,...lnces are at the same time labouring with diligence,
t:pd with
if unreq success, to work the popular oracle in
their favour. The oracle, however, is mute ; it makes no
sign, gad gives no hope. Another great meeting, as it is
facetionly described in the Chronicle, has been got up
in Liverpool of all places, being the third held there,
all within the compass of some dozen days, with two
dayS or separate reports of each meeting in that most
acute and provident Journal, by which the number is
doubled with the honest intent of mystifying the
public. At this last meeting, as at both of those
by which preceded, the talking and the walking gen-
tlemen were all the same, and the proceedings and
speeches the exact counterpart of those before. There
were present, for example, that most excellent and dig-
nified Whig-made Knight errant Sir Joshua Wallis-
ley, with the Worshipful Aldermen Brooks and Cobden,
of Manchester ; 'and these worthy persons not only de-
frayed all the talking expenditure of the day, but delivered
the same stereotyped speeches which were before sported
in Liverpool, and have since made the tour of Manchester,
Bolton, Blackburn, &c. Alderman Cobden was abroad as
usual, and in the character of traveller delivered out all
the wonderful things which none but travellers, since the
time of Munchausen, the prince of the tribe, ever see.
Alderman Brooks, who is a well-known wag, retailed the
last capital joke of his own invention ; he had discovered
that the Corn-laws were an " infernal machine." Hear his
own graphic and self-satisfied report of it. " After read-
ing Sir Robert Peel's speech the other day, he said to his
friend Mr. Alderman Cobden, What are we to do about
this infernal machine' (he always called them the infer-
nal machine) the Corn-laws ?" The meeting must have
been convulsed with laughter on the instant, but the fact
is perhaps suppressed by the Radical Liverpool Reporter.
With wit and wisdom thus gracefully confabulating to-
gether, the wit of Brooks and the wisdom of Cobden,
the country will be saved from the " infernal machine,"
it may be hoped, for it really seems a monster as terrific
as the iron devil that tears and prepares the raw cotton
in the cotton mill of Mr. Brooks.

GLOBE.—Expert as Sir R. Peel confessedly is in al-
the expedients of political chicane, he will scarcely suc-
ceed in his last move, by which he evidently means to
avert the dreaded discussion of the Corn-law question.
Into that discussion there will naturally be introduced an
exhibition of the mischiefs the Corn-laws have wrought
to the trade and commerce of the country. Well may
the Tories desire to prevent such an exhibition ! The
appalling aggregate of privation and suffering the Corn-
laws have entailed on thousands of our fellow country-
men, when brought, as they will be brought, into public
view , attested by 'evidence which cannot be contro-
verted, will excite sympathy for the sufferers in all who
have hearts to feel. The death of a system so preg-
nant with physical, social, and moral evils will be
decreed. Its sentence will be pronounced at the coming
election with unanimity of feeling and of act by every
popular' constituency. Throughout the kingdom the