The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1841-11-30 00:00:00

TO CORRESPONDENTS

Several communications are postponed.
We are compelled to postpone some remarks on the Schoo
Question, in reply to the Journal.

Ebt Ztherpool gPtanbarb.

TUESDAY MORNING, NOVEMBER 30, 1841

We may have appeared to our readers occasionally
to have gone out of our way to remark upon the im-
portance of the question of IMMIGRATION as applied
to our West India colonies ; and we have repeatedly,
for doing so, been met with the taunts of that portion
of the press which is opposed to us, as being " the es-
pecial advocates " of the interests of those colonies.
Would that we really deserved the imputation ! We
can see nothing which is disgraceful—nothing which
can be regarded as other than praiseworthy—in having
stood forward, at all times and with all our humble
powers, to protect the interests and to advance the
growth of those noble possessions, in whose prosperity
is embarked the liberties of millions of the human
race ; but, on the contrary, we should regard it as our
proudest boast if we could say that any effort of ours
has contributed to call attention to the wants under
which they are at present languishing, and in the sup-
ply of which the cause of humanity and freedom is so
deeply interested.

Entertaining these views, it is gratifying to us to ob-
serve that this subject, the immigration of free labour-
ers into our tropical colonies, has at length begun to
attract, from our brethren of the Contervative press,
the notice which it so eminently deserves. The Morn-
' ing Herald of Thursday last, in the course of a long
and able article, which we regret we have not space to
give entire, enters fully into the question as :one worthy
of the serious consideration of the legislature, and
confirms strongly the opinions respecting it which from
time to time we have felt it our duty to lay before our
readers and the public. Repudiating, as we have ever
done, the audacity with which the late unprincipled ad-
ministration proposed the introduction into Great Bri-
tain of the slave-raised sugar of Cuba and the. Brazils,
to appease the clitmorous outcry of a faction of free
traders and to gratify the hoarded malice entertained
against colonial interests by a busy knot of pseudo
philanthropists, our contemporary has, we think, clearly
and conclusively shown that it is within the poWer of
government,—by a wise and well-regulated encourage-
ment of the desire recently developed amongst the free
negro population of the United States and of Sierra
Leone, to emigrate to our West Indian islands, and es-
pecially to Guiana and Trinidad,—to provide for this
country a more than adequate supply of tropical pro-
ducts at a reasonable price and raised by free labour;
and at the same time to render those posseSsions of in-
finite value as consumers of the products of the mother

country.
To one portion of our contemporory's remarks we
cannot resist calling the attention of those advocates of
the cause of negro emancipation, (of whom that emi-
nent anti-corn law and anti-slavery oracle, Mr. Joseph
Sturge, is the most prominent,) who, whilst in their
zeal for the interest of the slave they would even incur
the risk of embroiling us with the slaveholding state.
of the American union, would gladly witness the with-
drawal of that legislative protection by which alone,
until provided with a measure of immigration, the
free labour colonies of Great Britain are enabled to
maintain themselves amidst the difficulties by which
they are surrounded.
"As an inducement," observes the Herald, " for
the immigration of the degraded free blacks of the
Union, Government might, we think, at once safely en-
courage the voluntary removal of the 15,000 negroes
who are now inhabitants of Canada, where they add
very little to the development of the resources, and
where, we fear, they are only less uncomfortable than
they were in the slavery of the republic, from which
for the most part they have escaped. The contented
and happy settlement of these Canadian blacks in Tri-
nidad and'Guiana would greatly encourage the migra-
tion of their brethren, now degraded residents in the
United States, to these colonies. The coloured popu-
lation of the republic watches with eager interest the
progress of emancipation in the West Indies, and the
great obstacle to a general emigration thither of several
hundreds of thousands is an apprehension—not wholly
unwarranted by past events, and greatly augmented by
slander and maudlin sentimentality, but which will ra-
pidly be dispelled by good works—as to the course of
conduct which the planters will pursue towards them.
A class of proprietors with better feelings, and imbued
with a knowledge of their wants and their duties, is
rapidly springing up in our west Indian islands, and
from it we anticipate a future period of unexampled
prosperity,—present difficulties being overcome. To
it we commend the cultivation of immigration from
the United States."
From a journal which has ever been foremost in the
advocacy of enlightened humanity, as has the Morning
Herald, such a declaration in favour of the policy of
encouraging immigration will, we are confident, have
its proper weight upon the honest and reflecting por-
tion of the anti-slavery party itself, accustomed as they
are to look with an eye of jealousy upon every proceed-
ing of the planters of our colonies, and occasionally to
confound colonial interests with that slavery itself
which they have succeeded in putting down. Let them
weigh well the fact which it discloses. The liberty and
happiness of two millions of enslaved human beings
in the United States—in that land to which the hand
of " Liberalism " ever points as its " pattern repub-
lic"—the happiness too of millions to whom as yet
the horrors of the middle passage, the fettered limb
and the chained soul, are things unknown -- are
dependent upon the issue of the attempt which is at
present being made to raise the products of the tropics
by free labour; and can we Contemplate the failure of
that attempt—which must dash to the earth those excited
hopes and annihilate every reasonable anticipation of
the permanent security and freedom of the entire negro
race—without feelings of pain and bitter disappoint-