did they speak of the Poles and the French, and the Greeks, and other brave nations which were struggling for freedom? How did they speak of Tell, and other heroes and patriots, who had achieved for themselves an imperishable name on the records of Fame? Were they rebels? Were they ruffians? Yet the same thirst for liberty animated both. And how were the insurrectionists of Jamaica answered? With the gibbet. When a slave was brought before a court martial in Jamaica, the only question was,- Was he taken in arms?' If the reply was 'Yes,' then,' said the president, take him and give him instant manumission and he was forthwith led off to the scaffold without the form or pretence of a trial. Mr. Thompson then alluded to a mean, lying, anonymous pamphlet, entitled 'Hints for those who propose attending the meeting at Exeter Hall, on Wednesday, the 15th of August.' The writer of that pamphlet tried to fix all the blame of the insurrection on the devoted and praiseworthy missionary. The only proof offered is the confession of certain condemned negroes, taken in their cells by the planters, and published by the planters; and upon this evidence the writer says Nobody who reads these confessions can doubt that they were misled by mischievous sectarian preachers, especially the Baptists.' As for charg ing it on the missionaries, they might as well charge it on the Archangel Gabriel, or on the Christian ministers who now surrounded him. There was no man so much entitled to their esteem as the West Indian missionary. What had he done? He had soothed the negro's fears and ele vated his hopes, and led him to the altar of our common father, and taught him to join in that heavenly anthem,'We praise thee O God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord. These were the men of whom the editor of a Jamai ca paper said that he would rejoice to see them hanging in the woods of St. James's and Trelawney, that they might diversify the scene; and of whom a member of the House of Commons had spoken in terms little less ferocious. We owed the possession of our colonies to the missionaries. Mr. Thompson then, after alluding to the selfishness of slavery, referred to the question of compensation, and said he should like to compute what was due to the negro, and what to the planter, and to strike a balance between them

The advocates of slavery, if not planters themselves, mostly had an interest in the property of planters, and many of them held mortgages over their slaves. They were dabblers in the system, and their eloquent invocations of feeling in behalf of the planter and his family were thus reduced to mere empty, heartless, hypocritical declamation. Mr. Thompson finally alluded to the impiety and guilt of slavery, but observed that time did not permit him to illustrate these He concluded a long, eloquent and impassioned address, of nearly two hours and a half, in the following words:

'Ladies and Gentlemen, I must now conclude. On another occasion, if I have the strength and opportunity, I shall say something more of the impiety of slavery, and the guilt of slavery. I think I have already said enough to give my friend on the other side an opportunity to reply. I have supplied him with a text, I have drawn out the skeleton of the discourse, I have been his pioneer, and it is for him to travel in the road which I have marked out. Much joy I wish him on his journey. If he can bring you to say that slavery is right, that slavery is politic, that slavery is necessary, nay, even that it is expedient, then I' say that common sense, is not common sense, justice is not justice, piety is not piety, religion is not religion, mercy is not mercy, love is not love. I leave this task to him. I cordially, and from my heart of hearts, thank you for the patient attention with which you have heard me; and there being many here who do not perfectly agree with me, I the more thank them for the gentlemanly, patient, and forbearing manner in which they have listened to sentiments that do not accord with their own. I charge and entreat those who do agree with me, not to hiss or attempt to interrupt the advocate of the West India body, when he addresses them to-morrow night from this place, but to give him as patient and attentive a hearing as that which has been granted to me.' (Much cheering and clapping of hands.)

2

Mr. Hodgson, the chairman, after expressing his hearty concurrence in Mr. Thompson's concluding observations, declared the meeting to be dissolved. The audience then slowly withdrew. A collection was made at the doors to defray the expenses of the evening.

(89)

MR. BORTHWICK'S LECTURE.

On Wednesday evening, at the same hour, the Amphitheatre was again crowded with a numerous assemblage to hear the reply of Mr. Borthwick, the agent of the West Indian body in this country.

Mr. ADAM HODGSON was again called to the chair, and after a neat and appropriate address, expressed a hope that the same order and decorum which had characterized the proceedings of the first night's discussion, would be exhibited on the present occasion.

Mr. BORTHWICK then stood forward and said, that the gentleman who lectured on the preceding evening was the agent of the Anti-Slavery Society, a body of men whose object was to obtain what they called immediate emancipation, but which, after all, they defined not to be immediate emancipation, but the substitution of what they called responsible and public authority, for private and irresponsible authority. It was his object to show that, in the first sense, immediate emancipation was not attainable in the present state of things; and as for the second sense, that did not seem to him to posses any determined or definite meaning. He had sufficient experience of Mr. Thompson as a lecturer to know that that gentlemen would not be satisfied if he merely attacked principles, and thus overthrew, or attempted to overthrow, the arguments found. ed upon them, unless he also went through every indivi dual argument or illustration, and overthrew that also. This would be his (Mr. B.'s) object to do in the first instance, and, in the second place, to introduce a few ar guments, totally unconnected with last night's lecture, in order to show the impracticability, the danger, the immorality, and the sin of any attempt immediately to emancipate, unconditionally, the slave of the West Indian colo nies. Before doing so, he must congratulate himself, Mr. Thompson, and the cause, on the very different tone which Mr. Thompson had now assumed. Mr. Thompson did not now, as he did at Manchester, tell them that the West

Indian merchants were inhuman or wholesale butchers,— that those who came forward in defence of the West Indian body were fools uttering what they knew to be falsehoods, and he congratulated Mr. Thompson on this desirable consumation. Mr. Thompson had enumerated no fewer than twenty-six evils as arising from the system of slavery-many of those twenty six-evils he had barely asserted without advancing any thing in the shape of proof, and, therefore, it was not without reason, he observed, that the gentleman who followed him would be obliged to have recourse to a sort of rail-road travelling, which, however new it might be in logic, would be absolutely necessary to follow Mr. Thompson in the course which he had adopted. He agreed with Mr. Thompson that it was a matter of perfect indifference to the question at issue, who were the parties to whom the guilt of first setting on foot the slave trade was attributed-but he was prepared to show that the planters were not the persons to whom the guilt was chargeable. The first evil, which, according to Mr. Thompson, was to be found on the threshold of slavery, was that it cursed with sterility the land where it existed; but did not the same sterility prevail wherever there was excessive cultivation of the land,—even where there were no slaves, and if it did, how could sterility, arising from such a cause, be deemed one of the special and peculiar characteristics of slavery? (Applause.) He recommended the gentlemen to include this head in a lecture on the evils of excessive agriculture,-not in one on the evils of slavery. (Laughter and applause.) The second evil was, that slavery gave rise to the slave trade ;-that was a most extraordinary mode of putting the cart before the horse indeed. For twenty-five years no slave had been brought into the colonies, and how could it be said that slavery necessarily produced and fostered the slave trade? (Applause.) The third evil alleged was, that slavery doomed the infant to the same condition as its father,—that was, it made the child a slave because its father and mother were slaves too. But was there any thing peculiar to slavery in that? Did it not universally happen that the child was born to the condition of its father? (Much hissing and applause.) [The Chairman earnestly desired a patient and uninterrupted hearing for the speaker.] It

was true that children endowed by heaven with greater talents, frequently raised themselves to a height which their fathers never knew; he might mention an Eldon and a Brougham, and many others in illustration, and he was prepared to prove that this might be the case, and had been the case even in a slave country. (Hear, hear.) In the colonies, the infant negro was born to the condition of a slave, just as the infant of a peasant, a king, or a lord, was born to the condition of a peasant, a king, or a lord, in other countries; but being born in any of those conditions, he was not necessarily confined to one. The gentleman had drawn a comparison between the present condition of the slaves he sought to emancipate, and the condition of the Jews under their Egyptian bondage, alleging that the same selfish motive which influenced Pharaoh induced the West Indian colonists to retain their slaves in bondage. There was no possible analogy between the cases. The Jews had gone into Egypt at the special invitation of the government, and resided there under its special protection: and did Pharaoh keep them there because he wanted more bricks? No; but because he was afraid that the Jews would become a mighty people, stronger than himself. Pharaoh resisted an express command of the Almighty to let them depart to worship God in the wilderness, and therefore he and his people perished in the Red Sea. Were the slaves in the West Indian colonies over-worked as the Jews were over wrought by Pharaoh, or treated in the same unjust manner as the Jews? He should show, before he concluded, that they were not, and, therefore, he contended that there was no resemblance between them and the Jews. For twenty-five years, the religious, moral, and physical improvement of the negroes had been proceeding, and that by the exclusive agency of the planters themselves; he would undertake to show that the slaves were gradually approaching to the condition of freemen, and that, by and by, if the good cause were not impeded by some such cumbrous help as that tendered by the Anti-Slavery Society,-(laughter, disapprobation and applause,)—if it were not so impeded, the good work which every religious and humane man wished to see,-freedom for the slave, with security to the master, would soon be accomplished. (Applause.)