The Sun.
London, England, 1833-05-16 00:00:00

••,/nr riT,Tfinc, sly-, 'Tr
though no longer subject to the brutalities of
the driver, may be kept at a kind of com-
pulsory labour. They may likewise object to
employment. of the produce of negro labour
(during the one-fourth part of their time which
they exchange with their masters for wages) to pay
for that freedom of which it was a crime and a
robbery to deprive the slave. They may even
contend with justice that, instead of owing any-
thing to their masters for striking off their fetters,
their masters, or the nation which, by its laws,
warranted their oppression, has an arrear of re-
paration and indemnity to discharge towards
them which it will be difficult to pay. But who
that has reflected on the present degraded con-
dition of the slave,—who that thinks of the
motives from which such a being must act,
hitherto driven to the canefield or the mill in
gangs by the cart-whip, like brute beasts,—who
that knows the ignorance in which they have
been studiously kept, the few wants (and
those of a merely animal kind) which they feel,
the ease with which those wants can be sup-
plied by a few hours of labour in the week, and
the present horrible associations which they
must have with any kind of work imposed for
the benefit of their cruel task-masters, can sup-
pose that, if unconditionally released from com-
pulsory toil, they would instantly leap out of
their chains and start up industrious labourers ?
A time of transition must be required, however
short,— compulsory labour must be exacted, how-
ever lenient,—till they become acquainted with the
ultimate intended change, and accustomed to
act from the stimulus of wages and the hopes of
bettering their condition, instead of the terrors of
the master's lash. But it is hardly fair to say that
they are still slaves, in the former sense of the word,
because they must continue to labour ; that they
have got nothing because they have got every-
thing; or that they may as well obey their master
as a magistrate, because they cannot retreat at
pleasure into " a castle of indolence." Look at
the third resolution published above, and which
we here repeat :—" That all persons now slaves
be entitled to be registered as apprenticed la-
bourers, and to acquire thereby all rights and
privileges of freemen, subject to the restriction
of labouring under conditions and for a time to
be fixed by Parliament, for their present owners."
Is this nothing? Is this nat a mighty change,
even though they are required tolabour 71- hours
a day ? What would any abolitionist have said
two or three years ago had the prospect been held
out of surrounding the negroes with such a
panoply of British rights ? Great hostility has
been expressed by the abolitionists to the em-
ployment of the wages derived from the employ-
ment of theirspare time, and doubts have been ex-
pressed whether the contribution of 15,000,0001.
to the planters is to be considered as a loan or
conferred as a grant. We neither quite understand
nor like what we do understand of this part of
the plan ; we suspect and fear it will ultimately
turn out to be a grant, though originally ad-
vanced as a loan ; and that part of the plan
seems complicated which places the twelve
years' emancipation-money of the apprenticed
negroes in the hands of a Government officer as a
liquidation of the planter's debt. Probably it
would be better, if this provision of the mea-
sure can be altered, to consider these contribu-
tions as the formation of a species of saving
bank for the negroes, to be given them after
their complete liberation. We should thus
make them pass through the transition state
from slaves to free labourers the more cheerfully,
as they would be accustomed to the idea that
they were working for their own benefit and lay-
ing up a little treasure. But there are other
parts of the plan which we have r no room to
di-cuss at present, though they may deserve
future consideration.— Times.
The debate on the corn laws in the House of
Peers on Tuesday evening was confined chiefly
to two speeches—that of Earl Fitzwilliam, the
mover of the resolutions, and that of the Earl
of Ripon, who opposed them,—and was re
markable only for two things—the almost unan-
swerable reasoning of the former, and the Minis-
terial declarations of the latter. The Noble
'Mover, both in the resolutions which he has
placed on the journals of Parliament, in his
address to the House of which he has become
an ornament, and in an able pamphlet which he
has published, in the shape ofa letter to " the
landowners of England," has proved that the
existing corn laws act as the most noxious im-
post on the industry of the country ; that they
artificially raise the price of the first necessary of
life to the great body of consumers, without a
proportional corresponding benefit to the owners
of land, or the producers of grain ; that they in-
jure the agricultural labourer by enhancing the
difficulty o obtaining the article which consti-
tutes the chief part of his subsistence, and the
chief source of his expenditure ; that they do not
enrich the farmer, whose fortunes and calcula•
tions they render more precarious than ever ; that
though they tend to keep up rents, the advantage
even to the landlord is liable to great uncertainty,
and subject to many drawbacks ; and that to the
great body of the manufacturing and commercial
community they are positively unjust and op-
pressive, diminishing the profits of trade, cur-
tailing the wages of labour, and tending to
deprive us of our foreign customers, by enabling
other manufacturing nations, whose food is un-
taxed, to undersell us in foreign markets. It
was lamentable to hear from the Earl of Ripon,
after such an impartial statement from a great
landed Peer, that the portion of the Cabinet in
the House of Lords is determined to oppose all
change in the corn laws, and to continue, at the
risk of their popularity, and to the detriment of
the public interests, such a manifest course of
impolicy and injustice. The resolutions, in such
an assembly, and under such leaders, were, of
course, negatived without a division ; but such a
negative vote would not, probably, be given by
any assembly in the kingdom beyond °the view
of the woolsack. The precipitate decision to
which their Lordships have come, when ad-
dressed by a Peer who has formed a delibe-
rate opinion on the subject, and whose
interests, as a landowner, arc identified
with those of the majority, makes it
of less consequence to enter at present
into a full exposure, by the press, of the ini-
quitous system which he denounced. Other
opportunities must soon occur for asserting the
rights of the community, though it would pro-
bably be too much to expect a change of the
law in the present session. if anything like
demonstration could ever be said to be brought
into the discussion of a point of commercial
policy, it would be found in the facts and
reasonings which go
to prove ther he manifest,, mischievous
results of the corn monopoly. i
even the avowed tendency of the corn laws is to
make food dear,—not dear as during the Bank
restriction, by a juggle in the currency—not
dear like tea, tobacco, or foreign spiiits, by a
tax levied upon it for the benefit of the Exche-
quer, but dear by its absolute scarcity,—dear by
the infliction of a smaller degree of famine ou