The Slave Trade, Domestic And Foreign Part 32

To the women of England much credit is due for having brought this question before the world. It is one that should have for them the deepest interest. Wherever man is unable to obtain machinery, he is forced to depend on mere brute labour; and he is then so poor that his wife must aid him in the labours of the field, to her own degradation, and to the neglect of her home, her husband, her children, and herself. She is then the most oppressed of slaves. As men obtain machinery, they obtain command of great natural agents, and mind gradually takes the place of physical force; and then labour in the field becomes more productive, and the woman pa.s.ses from out-of-door to in-door employments, and with each step in this direction she is enabled to give more care to her children, her husband, and herself.

From being a slave, and the mother of slaves, she pa.s.ses to becoming a free woman, the mother of daughters that are free, and the instructor of those to whom the next generation is to look for instruction.

The English system looks to confining the women of the world to the labours of the field, and such is its effect everywhere. It looks, therefore, to debasing and enslaving them and their children. The other looks to their emanc.i.p.ation from slavery, and their elevation in the social scale; and it can scarcely fail to be regarded by the women as well as by the men of England as a matter of duty to inquire into the grounds upon which their policy is based, and to satisfy themselves if it can be possible that there is any truth in a system which tends everywhere to the production of slavery, and therefore to the maintenance of the slave trade throughout the world.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Edwards' West Indies, vol. i. p. 255.

[2] Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, vol. iii. 575.

[3] Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, vol. iv. 155.

[4] Martin's Colonial Library, West Indies, vol. i. 90.

[5] Macpherson, vol. iv. 155.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Montgomery's West Indies, vol. ii. 114

[8] Macpherson, vol. iv. 155, 228.

[9] Macpherson, vol. iv. 155.

[10] The export to the foreign West Indies, from 1783 to 1787, is given by Macpherson at nearly 20,000.

[11] The causes of these diminutions will be exhibited in a future chapter.

[12] Macpherson, vol. iv. 144.

[13] The Cape and the Kaffirs, by Harriet Ward, London, 1852.

[14] Notes on Jamaica in 1850, p. 64.

[15] Ibid. 68.

[16] State and Prospects of Jamaica.

[17] The Corentyne.

[18] East bank of Berbice river.

[19] West ditto.

[20] West coast of Berbice.

[21] Prospective Review, Nov. 1852, 504.

[22] The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon, by Thomas Wright, p. 87.

[23] Ibid. p. 56.

[24] Where population and wealth diminish, the rich soils are abandoned and men retire to the poorer ones, as is seen in the abandonment of the delta of Egypt, of the Campagna, of the valley of Mexico, and of the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

[25] The land of England itself has become and is becoming more consolidated, the cause of which will be shown in a future chapter.

[26] Dallas's History of the Maroons, vol. i. page c.

[27] Macpherson, vol. iii. 394.

[28] Ibid. 574.

[29] Ibid. vol. iv. 255.

[30] Dallas's History of the Maroons, vol. i. cvii.

[31] Ibid. cv.

[32] Dallas's History of the Maroons, vol. ii. 358.

[33] See page 14, _ante_.

[34] Coleridge's "Six Months in the West Indies," 131.

[35] See pages 71-2, _ante_.

[36] Martin's West Indies.

[37] Tooke's History of Prices, vol. ii. 412.

[38] The reader who may desire to see this law fully demonstrated, may do so on referring to the author's Principles of Political Economy, vol. i. chap. v.

[39] Bigelow, Notes, 129.

[40] Ibid, 31.

[41] Ibid, 69.

[42] Bigelow, 125.

[43] Speech of Mr. James Wilson, December 10, 1852. On the same occasion it was stated that "the lower orders" are daily "putting aside all decency," while "the better cla.s.s appear to have lost all hope," and that the Governor, Sir Charles Grey, "described things as going on from bad to worse." The cholera had carried off, as was stated, 40,000 persons.

[44] The following case ill.u.s.trates in a very striking manner the value that is given to things that must be wasted among an exclusively agricultural population,--and it is but one of thousands that might be adduced: