The Sun.
London, England, 1844-08-29 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, THURSDAY EVENING, AUGUST 29, 1844.

HAYTI.

ADDRESS OF THE COMMITTEE OF THE
BRITISH AND FOREIGN ANTI-SLAVERY
SOCIETY TO THE PEOPLE OF HAYTI.
HArttAlts,-.-The great body of philanthropists in
Great Britain and Ireland, especially those who have
been actively engaged in securing the abolition of
slavery in the British colonies and possessions abroad,
have long taken a deep interest in your welfare, and
have watched with no common pleasure every indi-
cation of the rising greatness and prosperity of your
country.
Your enemies have pronounced you unworthy of
the liberty you enjoy, and have invented a thousand
calumnies to injure you in the eyes of the civilized
world. But your friends have been prompt to repel
those calumnies by an impartial appeal to the history
of your great struggles for freedom, and to demand
for you that consideration and justice which they
feel to be your due.
The object of your enemies has been not merely to
destroy your character, by exciting the horror and
disgust of the ignorant, the unreflecting, and the pre-
judiced against you, but by that means also to im-
pede the great work of African regeneration, and the
extinction of slavery and the slave-trade throughout
the world. In Great Britain this was the case previ-
ously to the abolition of slavery in its West India co-
lonies. In France it is the case, now that the friends
of human liberty there are exerting themselves to
achieve the same noble object for its colonial pos-
sessions.

Such being the fact, judge, then, of the pain
with which the sincere friends of Hayti have heard
of the unhappy divisions and disorders whit have drawn
upon you the eyes of Europe and America, and have
filled your enemies with exultation and delight. In the
continuance of those divisions and disorders they see the
germs of a civil conflict which will exhaust your
strength and resources, and make you the prey of a
powerful European State which once controlled your
destinies, and is still anxious to possess so splendid an
appendage to its territories as " the Queen of the
Antilles."

As the great organ of the abolitionists of this coun-
try, the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-
Slavery Society, in addressing you their sincere
counsel and advice, presume not to give an opinion on
the cause which has led to the late disastrous events
in your island. They deplore its existence, whatever
it might have been. They deplore them for your
sakes. They deplore them for the sake of Africa.
They deplore them for the sake of the millions of your
race now held in bondage. They deplore them for
the sake of mankind at large, ft,r so long as the en
slavement of any portion of the human spec:es shall
be continued, so long► will the final triumphs of
justice, civilization, and religion be arrested in its
course.

But the Committee sincerely trust that the events
they deplore may be finally terminated; that Hayti
may be preserved free and independent ; that stability
may succeed to disorganization ; and that the whole
body of the Haytian people may feel that whatever
cause of dissatisfaction they may have had with the
past state of affairs, that now they have the strongest
reason to combine loyally and firmly with each other,
to promote the welfare of their common country, to
develop its vast resources, and to cause it to be re-
spected lsy the nations of the earth.
To the accomplishment of this great end the Com-
mittee would earnestly exhort you to lay aside all
sectional jealousies. Let the parties in the east, the
west, the north, and the south feel that there is a
nobler object to be gained than mere political pre-
dominance, namely, the welfare of their common
country. Let there be mutual forbearance ; let diffe-
rences of opinion be healed by wise counsels and
ge-
nerous concessions ; and let it ever be remembered
that there is no wisdom in the sword, which is the
mere symbol of physical force, not of enlightened
reason ; of brutal passion, not of calm deliberation ;
of proud ambition, not of self-sacrifice and love of
country.

Let not the pride of caste and the prejudice of
colour dissever you. Strange that the children of a
common Parent, endowed with similar mental and
moral attributes, influenced by similar affections and
passions, should allow the tincture of the skin to form
an impassable barrier to fraternal union and generous
co-operation. On this point the Committee appeal to
you as brethren ; for however much they differ from
you in complexion, they reel unied to you by a
common origin, and would enforce and practise the
common obligations arising out of those natural re-
lations which were intended by the great Creator to
bind man to man in a holy and inseparable brother-
hood.

Let not differences of religious conviction, opinion,
and practice, separate you. The rights of con-
science are of paramount importance. Where
they are not respected, no other rights are or
can be secure. On this point the Committee
appeal to you as Christians, and, with the history
of Europe open before their eyes, where they
behold the ascendancy of Catholicism on the one hand,
and Protestantism on the other, and the bitter fruits
which have resulted from it, they would earnestly
exhort you to avoid the perils of religious con-
' filet. Intolerance of the opinions of others in mat-
ters of ;religion is the offspring of bigotry ; and
bigotry, if it be not controlled by public opinion,
leads to proscription and persecution. "Let every
man be fully persuaded in his own mind," is the lan-
guage of the great apostle of the Gentiles. Let, there-
fore, those who suppose themselves in possession of the
truth use none other weapons in its propagation and
defence than those furnished by enlightened reason
and the sacred canon of the Scriptures ; and instead
of the bitterness of strife, let there he a holy emula-
tion to follow the divine example of the great Re-
deemer of mankind, who, whilst oa earth, " went
about doing good," and who came into this world,
' " not to destroy men's lives, but to save them."
Feeling the deep importance of the subject on
which they have addressed you, the Committee have
foreborne to appeal to you on the lower ground of
self-interest; yet they would venture to remind you
that never was there so favourable an opportunity
enjoyed by Hayti as the present m•mment offers, for
the development of her internal resources and the in-
crease of her foreign trade. Not only has Great
Britain repealed a detestable law, which forbade
Haytian vessels and Haytians from entering the
ports of her colonies, but her Legislature, during the
last session of Parliament, has enacted a law which
allows sugar, the produce of free labour, to enter her
markets on favourable terms, whilst it excludes that
raised by the oppression of the slaves in Brazil and
the Spanish colonies.
Haytians, you have now an opportunity presented
to you of benefiting your country, by the establish-
ment of peace among yourselves; by calling into ac-
tivity the energies of your cultivators; by the enact-
ment of just laws, and their impartial administration ;
and by promoting the intellectual, moral, and reli-
gious improvement of your rising youth. We
earnestly beseech you thus to act, and thereby falsify
the sinister predictions of your enemies, and realise
the sanguine expectations of your friends. By
adopting this line of conduct, you will greatly assist
the friends of human liberty in every part of the
world in their exertions to promote the abolition of
slavery and the slave-trade, and will assuredly hasten
the coming of that day when the fetters by which
millions of human beings are tortured in body, and
degraded in mind, shall be universally broken.
On behalf of the Committee,
(Signed) THOMAS CLARKSON.
27, New Broad-street, London. Aug. 16.

THE OLD HOUSE OF COMMONS.
Who that has sat in the gallery of the old House of
Commons—that venerable building which the calami-
tous fire of October 16th, 1834, reduced to ashes—can
fail to recollect his first feelings of disappointment as
he gazed with a sense of wounded pride around the
dark and narrow room, and looked in astonishment at
Honourable Members grouped in various attitudes of
carelessness and indifference ! The aspect of the
Chapel, plain almost to rudeness, appears to have struck
an intelligent French stranger with a feeling akin to
pity, or contempt. "La salle," he writes, " est petite
et sans decoration—point de marbre—point d'or—
point de peintures."* Its paltry dimensions, confined
space, and want of accommodation, could only be
adequately described in the vernacular of Cobbett,
who possessed the peculiar faculty of disenchanting
his readers from all charms of poetry, of vulgarising
the noble, and debasing the sublime. " Why," he
asks, with the natural indignation of a new Member,
" are six hundred and fifty-eight of us crammed into
a space that allows to ns no more than half a foot
square ? There we are, crammed into this little hole,
squeezing one another, treading upon each others'
toes, running about to get a seat, going to the
hole at seven o'clock in the morning, as I do, to
stick a bit of paper with my name on it on a bench,
to indicate that I mean to sit there for that day ;
then routed out of those places again after a divi-
sion has taken place, and running and scrambling
for a seat in just the same manner as people do
when they are let into a dinner-room at a
public dinner at the Crown and Anchor or elsewhere."
Yet such as it was, " cabin'd and confined," undeco-
rated for a century, decked only with a new coat of
painting and whitewash, destitute of all architectural
pomp, unadorned by a single monument of sculpture
or art—into that building what intelligent stranger
was ever ushered for the first time without a throb-
bing heart and heightened pulse I Who but has
lowered his voice on first entering that room as he
felt the genius of the place compelling awe, the
deep inspiration of the past ! Mighty memories, sub-
lime associations, breathe their subduing spells around
the stranger. Within those walls the battles of hu-
manity have been fought, the privileges of freedom
vindicated, and the liberties of England won. For
not less than ten generations, ever since the gentle

* " The hall is small, and with)ut ornament—wanting
marble, gilding, and paintings,"

Edward VI. allotted that consecrated chamber to the •
great council of Parliament, the genius and virtue,
the dignity and rank, the wisdom and eloquence, of
the nation have been there represented. Treasures
of statesmanship have been lavishly poured forth in
that hall, which there was no prudent hand to gather.
There blushed the chivalry of Raleigh, there wept the
servile patriotism of Coke, there recorded its protest the
faithful loyalty of Hyde. Its floor was once profaned
by the hasty step of the unhappy Charles, who left his
guards at the door as he faltered into the Speaker's
chair—once far more basely desecrated by the stamp
of Cromwell, as be crowded the benches of a truck-
ling assembly with the myrmidons of an usurper.
But fearfully was the insult avenged ; nobly have
those assaults of despotism been requited by the Acts
of freedom—the Habeas Corpus Act, the Bill of
Rights, and the Act of Settlement—those death war-
rants of tyranny which have since been read there as
law. There with an eye glowing fire eloquent as his
voice, Chatham spoke for immortality, and triumph-
ing over physical weakness and bodily decay, made
his very crutch an instrument of oratory—there the
great Commoner crushed the House of Bourbon, and
smote her power with that electrical shock which re-
verberated in another hemisphere. On that floor
the mighty Burke—great even in his failures—
threw down the dagger, as a specimen of the pre-
sents which French fraternity was preparing for his
countrymen. There Castlereagh walked proudly
up the House amid loud huzzas, with the Treaty of
Peace, signed at Paris, in his hand. There Canning
called the new world into existence, that he might
redress the balance of the old. By the table in that
Chapel, afterwards stained with Percival's blood, the
brow of the boldest warrior has grown pale, as he
stood up to receive the thanks of the House, and
with trembling voice stammered forth his gratitude.
Blake, and Albemarle, and Schomberg, Marl-
borough, and a greater even than that proud captain,
the hero of a hundred fights, the Duke of Welling-
ton, have drunk in there the pealing applause which
heralded Westminster Abbey. At that bar the
proudest of England's peers have bent the head to
deprecate the Commons' vengeance ; the governor of
millions—the Ministers of State—have there bowed
the knee, and in their impeachment confessed
the grandeur of ,the great national inquest.
There the noblest sons of genius—Bacon,
and Newton, and Wren, Addison, Gibbon,
Mitford, have sat mute but not inglorious.'
There Oglethorpe taught the lesson of humanity to
inspect our prisons, and Meredith and Romilly
pleaded, against capital punishments, that criminals
still were men. These walls have rung with shouts
of triumph as the slave-trade went down in its ini•
quity. Peals of laughter have awakened the echoes
of that chamber to generations of wits—Martin and
Coventry, Charles Townshend, and Sheridan, and
Canning. The hollow murmurs of sympathy have
there rung back the funeral tribute to the elder awl
younger Pitt. to Grenville, and Horner, to that
eloquent orator, conspicuous among his countrymen,
Grattan, who in his dying hour there poured forth
his soul. What exhilarating cheers, the only re-
wards to St. John, for those lost orations which
have perished for ever, have there rewarded the ef-
forts of Pitt and Fox, as they sunk back exhausted !
The forgotten oratory of that chamber would more
than balance all that is recorded! Magnificent as the
new building may be, adorned with paintings and
embellished with trophies of our progress in the arts,
far more convenient than the old chamber, in splendour
not to be compared, the palace Of senators, and not
the mere hall—it can never rival, in the mind's eye,
that humbler room empannelled with living memories,
blazoned with illustrations of the past. The cloud of
light, which filled the old temple with the glory of
the Presence, far more than transcended the vivid
splendours of the new. Though the rising structure
cannot be for centures what St. Stephen's Chapel has
been, it will stand, we may rest assured, as the former
House, the classical sanctuary of Britain's intellectual
greatness, the chosen palladium of her proudest attri-
butes—freedom, and eloquence, and power.—Towns-
end's Memoirs of the House of Commons.

SUMMER ASSIZES.
NORTHERN ClRCUlT.—Liverpool, Aug. 27.

CIVIL SlDE.—(Before Mr. Justice CRESSWELL.)
WOOD V. MONK.

The trial of this case was resumed this morning, and
several witnesses were examined on behalf of the de-
fendant, from whose evidence it appeared, that what-
ever might have been the conduct of the defendant, that
of the plaintiff was by no means without blame. It was
sworn that he was in the habit of beating and otherwise
grossly ill-treating his wife ; that he had been in the
habit of consorting with other women to the neglect of
his own wife, and had behaved altogether in such a man-
ner as to leave little or no hope, of obtaining more than
nominal damages, if that, at the hands of th jury. The
Learned Counsel on both sides seemed to think that it
was high time the disgusting detail was put an end to,
and the controversy was at length closed by both parties
consenting to withdraw a juror. A juror was accord-
ingly withdrawn, and no verdict given for either, each
party being left to pay his own costs.

Laidler—Why did Burnley dare to reduce our al-
lowance of bread and meat ? It was better to be here
in the worst prison, than to be there working under
an African sun under a short allowance. There
was no end to the buckets of beef and bread he sent
ashore, while we were left in a shocking state. It's
false to say we mutinied.
The LORD MAYOR—Why, you admit that you
were guilty of mutiny by stating that you disobeyed
Captain Burnley when you were bound to obey. It
is quite plain to me that you were one of the principal
leaders in the mutiny, and take care that you are not
called upon to answer to the charge of the person
whom you have come here to calumniate. After all
the captains of the English vessels in the river had
in vain tried to bring you to a proper sense of your
duty, the man who ought to have authority over you
was obliged, as a last resource, to apply to the King.
1 He had no alternative.

Laidler—l have not stated a word that's false. I
say, that after being slaughtered and wounded, we
were dragged out of the ship and confined in -huts,
and two of the crew were killed with poisoned water.
The LORD MAYOR—You were not fired upon until
you fired and killed two of King Eyamba's men, and
I judge from the depositions that you were treated
with forbearance to which you had no claim. There
is no doubt at all that you all acted in the most des-
perate manner, and the probability is that Mr. Sharp
will look after you and make you responsible.
Laidler—l shall take care to look after him and
make him responsible. Depend upon it I shall not
be quiet till I have justice done to me. I say we
were all treated in the most savage manner. My chest
was broken open.
The LoRD MAYOR —ln the chest of most of the
crew were found property belonging to others. You
have assailed the characters of others, and depend
upon it you will be made to feel that there has not
been the least excuse for the course you have been
pursuing.
Laidler then left the justice-room, declaring that he
would try elsewhere for satisfaction.
The manner of the seaman was brutal and menacing
in the extreme, presenting an extraordinary contrast
to the gentle and pathetic description of his suffer-
ings and feelings on the occasion of his first appli...a-
tion to Sir John Pirie.

Sir JOHN PIRIE most unequivocally expressed his
opinion as to the mutinous conduct of the crew, and
hoped the statements which had gone abroad had done
no injury to the character of Mr. Burnley.