The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-05-18 00:00:00

ANNIVERSARY MEETING OF THE ANTI-SLAVERY

SOCIETY, AT EXETER-HALL.

(From our London Correspondent.)

Well, thank Heaven; there is one rank imposture less in
the world ! The Society of Mawworms, who, for the last
half century, have exhibited periodically at Exeter-hall, and
elsewhere, their overflowing benevolence towards " the poor
children of Africa ;" whose itinerant members have startled
the ears of the rustics in our country towns with horrible
stories of negro suffering in our West Indian Islands ; who
have deluged " meeting-houses" with the tears of sensibility,
wrung from the hearts of philanthropic ladies and maidenly
bachelors, and extracted half-crowns and half-sovereigns by
the hundred, from most exquisitely fashioned purses, to be
expended in printing reports and other incidental expenses"
—(an item this, by the bye, which generally bears about the
same proportion to the really useful expenditure of any hum-
bug of this kind, as the two gallons of sack to the halfp'orth
of bread in Sir John Falstaff's tavern bill) ;who have paint-
ed the woolly-headed negroes of our plantations as so many
Apollos and Venuses ; and the planter himself as some mon-
ster and " chimera dire," fit only to be invoked to frighten
children in the nursery, and to excite pretty shudders from
misses in their teens ;—THE ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, with
Thomas Clarkson at its head and John Cropper at its tail,
has blown up like any other soap-bubble of the kind, and
will no more be able, by its tales of horror, or by its rank
and loathsome hypocrisy, to " fright the isle from its pro-
priety"—to extract pounds, shillings, and pence from the
befooled and bamboozled people of this easily gulled nation !
It has always been my opinion, I must confess—and a week
ago I ventured to express it in the columns of THE STAN-
DARD—that the professions of humanity to the negro, indul-
ged in, " usque ad nauseam," by the mock liberals of this
country, were a little tinged with a spirit of inveterate hosti-
lity—political hostility—towards the West Indian body.
From the Anti-Slavery Reporter—the great organ of the
humanity-mongers—down to such " small deer" as your
own Mercury, the columns of the anti-slavery journals have
Been devoted unceasingly to the propagation of slander and
misrepresentation of the character, and to the depreciation
of the property, of the planters of our colonies. To put down
slavery has been the ostensible, but to ruin the West Indian
proprietor has been the real object of these canting conspi-
rators. And yet I attended the meeting of the Anti-Slavery
Society yesterday, with the idea, I must own, that however
spotted with the leprosy of hypocrisy might be the general
mass of the body—that with whatever alacrity its Liverpool,
its Manchester, or its Rochdale committees, composed of
such pure materials as I know them to be composed of, might
be ready to turn round with her Majesty's incapables, and
follow any dirty course which would put the fraction of a
farthing in their pockets—such men at least as Clarkson and
Gurney, Fowell Buxton and Allen—men who have made the
mitigation of the horrors of slavery the professed business of
a whole life, and who are acquainted with the working of the
system in all its branches, would not allow themselves to be
blinded by the same flimsy pretences—the same shuffling so-
phistry, which has been doled out during the past week, to
bewilder the addled intellects of " liberal" members of the
House of Commons. From the lips of such men I expected
to hear the indignant resolution proclaimed, that it was not
a slight thing—that it was not to afford a temporary support
to a falling and a desperate ministry—that they were pre-
pared to peril the fruits of years of exertion and millions of
expenditure—to crush the growing prosperity of that new
race of freemen they have created—to rivet the fetters upon
millions who are still enslaved—and to give power to the
Juggernaut which is to trample upon millions who are yet
unborn. But I heard no such gratifying and elevated senti-
ments at this meeting. The business of the. various speakers,
with one exception—(that of the son of Fowell Buxton, who,
in his own name and that of his father, repudiated the minis-
terial propositon)—appeared to be to disclaim any wish to
embarrass the government in its attempt to introduce slave-
grown sugar. The attention of the meeting was studiously
led away from the consideration of the probable working of
that measure to that of slavery in the East Indies, slavery
in America, in Texas, in all the world ; but not a whisper
was there of slavery in the Brazils or in Cuba—not a word
of that devastating traffic in human flesh—not a word of that
" using up" of living beings in the cultivation of the sugar
with which (as a boon indeed !) Great Britain is about to
sweeten the food of her manufacturing population. Not a
word of all this was uttered yesterday ; but of abuse of the
West Indian body and of the tory party we had ample mea-
sure, intermingled with not a little of the clap-trap of cheap
bread and free trade !

The most ineffably disgusting exhibition of the day, how-
ever, was the exhibition of Mr. Daniel O'Connell as the
apologist, "ex officio," of her Majesty's ministers. He,
forsooth, was about to save harmless the reputation of the
whole fraternity of philanthropists by moving In the House of
Commons that foreign free labour sugar should be admitted
at an equal duty with the produce of free labour in our colo-
nies. Foreign free labour sugar! Where can such a com-
modity be found ? The immeasurable vagabond had the cool
assurance to put forward this transparent fraud upon the
credulity of a British public ; and the meek and saintly mem-
bers of the anti-slavery society sate quietly by and counte-
nanced the fraud. Nay, more; these pure and pious gentle-
men, who had just previously expressed such a holy horroi: of
the introduction of anything of a political nature at their
meeting—whose objects were restricted solely to the sup-
pression of slavery throughout the world—sate by and cheered
and chuckled whilst this "miscreant" demagogue, amidst the
disgust of nine-tenths of the meeting, interlarded the mingled
blarney and blackguardism which forms the staple of his
diatribes, with the most reckless and unblushing falsehoods
directed against the West Indian body, and the most delibe-
rate perversion of the real object of the great measure of
emancipation, which was ever uttered by any thing in the
shape of humanity. .

It needed not the aid of O'Connell, however—and his ad-
vocacy would damn any cause, however seemingly righteous
—to convince the world that the humanity-mongers with
whom he is associated are in the mass as rank a set of hollow
imposters as ever palmed themselves by saintly and hypo-
critical pretences upon the credulity of a country. Well,
indeed, has Lord John Russell proved that he at least esti-
mated in its precise degree the immeasurable virtue of those
straight-haired philanthropists—that he knew a charm which
could effectually lay the " spirits, white, blue, grey," and
drab, which he had evoked to aid him in his emancipation
fraud—(for as coupled with his present proposition that mea-
sure is a fraud, and an expensive one.) A cheap loaf—the
annihilation of the agricultural interests—oh, what a magic
effect has such a view in prospect upon the sensibilities of some
How suddenly the echoes of Mark-lane and Brunswick-street
became filled with lamentations over the sufferings of white
slaves in the manufacturing districts—of overworked factory
children and starving weavers ! Give us foreign corn, cheap
corn ; let the food of the people of Great Britain be locked
up in our warehouses, imported in our vessels ; give us bro-
kertige, and commission, and storage, and cartage, with what
little else we can make by operating-upon markets and hoard-
ing up supplies, and we will burn all our "free labour sugar"
tickets, for we can no longer bamboozle the sweet-toothed
humane thereby. We cannot in our consciences (!) permit