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

HAYTI.

ADDRESS OF THE COMMIT TEE OF THE
BRITISH AND FOREIGN ANTI-SLAVERY

SOCIETY TO THE PEOPLE OF HAYTI.
lIIYTIANS,—The great body et philanthropists in
Great Britain and Ireland, especially those who have
been actively engaged in securing the abolition of
slavery in the British colonies road possessions abroad,
have long taken a deep interest 3,n your welfare, and
have watched with no common pleasure every indi-
cation of the rising greatness arid 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-
lonic•s. 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
ith which the sincere friends of Hayti have heard
of the unhappy divisions and disorders whic 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, for so long as the en•
slavement of any portion of the human species 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 by 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 feel united 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-
flict. 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 be a holy emula-
tion to follow the divine example of the great Re-
deemer of mankind, who, whilst on 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 moment 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, durinc, 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. •
Ilaytians, 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, Lendon. 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
f,%il 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
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 hit 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 at 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 fer the first time without a throb-
bing heart and heightened pulse ! 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