§ EARL GREY, in moving the Order of the Day for going into Committee on the Tobago Relief and Immigration into British Guiana and Trinidad Bill, said, that in 1844, in consequence of earnest applications which were addressed to the Government, the noble Lord (Lord Stanley), who then held the office of Colonial Secretary, gave his sanction to the raising of loans for aiding the immigration of free labourers into our West Indian colonies; and, on the understanding that the repayment of those loans would be provided for by the colonies, measures were taken to introduce a number of free labourers into the West India islands. No guarantee was given for the repayment of the loans, which were raised merely on the credit of the colonies. 423 During the first three years a portion of the loans was punctually repaid; but in the autumn of last year, in consequence of the commercial distress which existed in the colonies, occasioned by various circumstances, it was found impossible to provide means for meeting the charge; and the object of this Bill was to afford assistance to the amount of 170,000l. to the colonies in meeting the expenditure which had already been incurred, and not to carry out any further measures of a similar nature. He had the opinion of his two immediate predecessors in the Colonial Office to fortify him in stating his conviction that the introduction of Coolies into the colonies was far too expensive to answer the object in view, and that the only profitable source of free labour must be Africa. The noble Lord concluded by moving that their Lordships should go into Committee on the Bill.
LORD BROUGHAMobserved, that as this was a Money Bill their Lordships must cither adopt it altogether, or reject it altogether; they had no power to make any alteration in it. He would be most unwilling to defeat any measure which was intended to benefit our West India colonies; for there was no portion of the empire which had a stronger claim on the consideration of the British Parliament than those colonies. They had been the victims not merely of earthquakes and of hurricanes, but of worse evils—he meant the over-varying policy of the mother country. In order to furnish a nursery for our seamen, we required the colonies to submit to the African slave trade, against which infliction some of them protested. Then came the philanthropic efforts of this country, of which the colonies were made the first victims. Next followed the emancipation of the negroes—a measure of the highest justice, humanity, and soundest policy; but he was bound in fairness to the colonies, to the negroes, and to the cause of truth and justice itself, to admit that that measure was not, perhaps, carried into effect with all the due deliberate consideration which ought to have accompanied it, and the want of which had given rise to, he would not say its failure, but its imperfect success. Consequently, the unhappy colonies were again sufferers. Last of all came the reign of free trade; and again he must admit, though himself a free-trader, that the colonies suffered from our somewhat pedantic and excessive extension of the principles of free trade, without any 424 consideration of the circumstances which ought to have modified the application of those principles. Here again the colonies were the victims, and this was the worst of all their former sufferings; but he believed that in the end sugar would be dearer by the policy pursued, as this country well deserved it should be, for having criminally as well as foolishly departed from the principles of justice and humanity, and resolved, from a desire of getting cheap sugar by means of free trade, to encourage the African slavetrade. The just retribution of our shortsighted and guilty policy, would be the dearth of sugar, which we had hoped to make cheap. In all these instances our fellow-countrymen in the colonies had had inflicted on them by the policy of the mother country evils against which they had struggled in vain, and the results of which gave them an ample right to protection and favour, which in this case was but strict justice. Therefore he should give no opposition to the further proceedings on this Bill, though it was coupled with the advance of aid to the colonies in question for the purpose of meeting the expenditure which had already been incurred for the immigration of free labourers. That was now a debt, whether rightly or wrongly incurred, to be discharged. But he could not see the question of the immigration of free labourers introduced to their Lordships' notice by the present Bill, without entering, after the most ample consideration of the subject, his protest against the whole of that system. With respect to the Coolies, the expense would render it impossible to carry it into effect; but on all other grounds he was opposed to the speculation of introducing into our colonies on a large scale persons sent over from Africa. With all the knowledge which fifty years' advocacy of the abolition of slavery and the slave trade gave him—with all the information which he was able to glean from the works and the statements of various parties—it was his unhesitating opinion that any plan for the extensive importation from Africa of free negroes to the Mauritius or to our West Indian colonies (and, in order to be of any use, it was admitted that it must be extensive), could not by possibility do otherwise than degenerate into a revival and extension of the African slave trade. It was impossible, by any regulations or by any system of checks or of control, to prevent the exportation of the inhabitants from such a conntry as 425 Africa becoming a traffic in African slaves. Let them talk as they might about regulations; human avarice, human love of gain, and human fraud would evade them. They could have no means of preventing the evils of the African slave trade being revived, if they allowed a general system on a large scale of the immigration to our colonies of what were called free labourers from Africa. Under such a system he contended that they could not prevent large numbers of persons from being kidnapped in the interior of Africa, and then sent down to the coast and shipped as free emigrants. Then the great sacrifice of human life resulting from the middle passage would be renewed, because, if any system of immigration was to be of any use, there must be a general supply of as many negroes as might be wanted. The noble and learned Lord here referred, in order to show the mortality likely to ensue from a general system of immigration, to the result of the transport of a party of immigrants in Her Majesty's steamer Growler. The number of immigrants embarked was 445; the vessel was 18½ days on her passage, and during that time 10 per cent of the immigrants died, and a considerable amount of them were landed in a state of suffering from ill-health. He was most anxious to help in dispelling the delusion under which many of the West Indians and others laboured, that anything could be honestly effected by free immigration from Africa equal to their requirements. It would only be the slave trade under another name. In connexion with this subject, he must observe, that the eyes of other countries were on England in these respects. He had a letter from Paris taunting this country with her measures of free trade in respect to sugar; and, crossing the Atlantic, what said Mr. Calhoun? He said—
Let England no longer talk against us and taunt us with our slave population in Virginia, Carolina, and Georgia. England is now engaged in reviving the African slave trade under the specious pretext of importing African free labourers.He never would allow it to be said that he or those with whom he was accustomed to act over entertained any doubt whatever that it had always been one of their first duties to make war upon the African slave trade, and to carry on that war without ceasing, by all lawful means. They should never allow it to be said that they had engaged in such an undertaking, and had failed in it, attempting that which they 426 were unable to accomplish. It was said that Spain and Portugal still carried on the slave trade; but what was that to us? We were not Spain or Portugal. Others might not follow the example of England, though he hoped that eventually many would do so; but, whether they did or did not, England had done her duty. We had "removed the accursed thing from our camp." Then, he would say, let all possible encouragement be given at home to those who laboured against every species of slavery; let this most holy warfare be urged against the execrable African slave trade until the object against which our hostility was waged ceased to exist otherwise than as matter of history. He doubted not that in the long-run all other countries would join with us in declaring the slave trade to be piracy: there was evidently no moral distinction between stealing a chattel out of a ship or robbing its crew, and the crime of robbing an the coast of Africa, and carrying the acquisitions so made across the common highway of nations, which was polluted by the guilty passage. Let all nations be induced to unite in declaring that a trade in human beings was piracy, and then there would be an end to the slave trade. It was not a true representation of the fact to say that our efforts made things worse, and that our attempts to improve the state of the negro had a tendency to deteriorate his condition. For such statements there was no rational foundation; but whatever men might say, he and those with whom he was accustomed to act, had done their duty; and, having attained their present position, let there be no backsliding—let them have no more of feeding the great labour-market of the west with immigration, which was neither more nor less than a return to the slave trade. He had no objection to the grant of money for the purposes contemplated by the Bill; but he could not let the present opportunity pass without recording his unabated hostility to the slave trade, and his protest against all and every measure that tended to revive or extend it.
§ LORD WHARNCLIFFEreferred to a despatch from the Governor of Antigua, who suggested that two or three or a greater number of estates, might carry on their operations in one set of buildings. Economy, he thought, would be greatly promoted by means of united buildings.
§ EARL GREYsaid, that in the application of the sums to be granted under the 427 proposed measure, the precedents supplied by former occasions would be followed as nearly as possible. It was intended to assist various estates in the re-establishment of works which had been injured by the recent hurricanes. It would, of course, be impossible peremptorily to dictate to proprietors the manner in which those moneys were to be applied; but, if he were to express an opinion on the subject, he should say that in as many cases as possible the principle of united works ought to be adopted. Two or three estates might easily be served by one set of works. He should not go over again, with the noble and learned Lord opposite, the course of policy which that noble and learned Lord had thought it fitting to bring under the notice of the House. Other occasions would arise upon which such a discussion could be much more advantageously taken than in considering the Bill now before them. As to the general policy of introducing free labourers into our West India colonies, the noble and learned Lord said it would amount to nothing less than a revival of the slave trade in another shape. Upon that point he should just take the liberty of observing, that a wide difference existed between bringing freemen from Africa, and carrying slaves from that part of the world. The noble and learned Lord, in order to show that that practice would be a revival of the slave trade, was bound to prove, first, that those labourers were bought, and, secondly, that they were treated as slaves. Now, neither of those conditions could be performed. If not bought, they could not be sold, and, if not treated as slaves, they must be regarded in the light of freemen. As men could not be bought or sold in the West Indies, as it was no man's interest to buy, the practice had altogether ceased; no complaint therefore, could now be fairly made on behalf of the working population of the West Indies; and it was commonly said that there the master was a slave, and the working man a master; for the working classes could dictate their own terms. The noble and learned Lord, as it appeared to him, had most unjustly said, that the existing practice revived the horrors of the middle passage; he also complained of the mortality which had prevailed on board the Growler—a mortality which could easily have been accounted for by the heat of the climate as well as the heat on board which the steam and the working of the machinery occasioned. A fever conseqently broke out in 428 the vessel, and that was the great cause of the mortality. But amongst our troops, as well as our sailors, there had been a mortality exceeding ten per cent on a voyage. The total mortality in all the emigrant ships last year, was just the same as on board the Growler. If their Lordships referred to the report of the Emigration Commissioners for 1845, they would find the results of the voyages in the years 1843 and 1844. In those years there were 1,519 emigrants, and the Commissioners said that in fourteen voyages from Sierra Leone, ten were performed without the occurrence of a single casualty, and in the remaining four the whole number of deaths was only eleven; that is, the number of emigrants mentioned had been conveyed from Africa to the British colonies with the loss of only eleven lives. The Commissioners added, that this result was the more striking, considering that in two of the vessels the small-pox broke out. In one month of 1848, out of 159 liberated Africans embarked, only five had died. He denied that this system would lead to a revival of the slave trade; and, least of all, to the revival of the horrors of the middle passage. The emigration was purely voluntary; but he lamented to say that the erroneous notions which had been circulated in Africa had had the effect, to a certain extent, of stopping emigration. The natives had been told that they were to be taken away and killed, in order that their blood might be used for some purpose. He believed, that if the cultivation of sugar in the British colonies were not to be stopped, this species of emigration was of the greatest importance to those colonies; that the introduction of the imported negroes would have a beneficial effect upon the resident negroes. The competition of the imported negroes would be of great advantage in bringing down the extravagant rate of wages. It could not be attended with advantage to the negroes themselves that the wages should be kept up at their present extravagant rate; and the competition had already been attended with great advantage in this respect, by giving to the resident negroes a motive to labour, and preventing the planters from being at the entire mercy of their labourers. He had been gratified to receive evidence from various quarters, that the negroes who had been introduced into our colonies had rapidly assimilated with the resident negro population. It was a fact worthy of mention, that the Growler had 429 carried back from Africa some negro labourers who had large sums of money, the produce of their earnings, and that they had recommended the Kroomen to go to Guiana, where they would obtain the same advantages. Those negroes who went back to their native country, after a sojourn in a British colony, might do more to diffuse knowledge, and to civilise their country, than could be effected by any other means hitherto suggested. He believed, if we continued for a few years to carry negroes or voluntary emigrants to our colonies, and returned them to Africa, that, whilst we should do much to benefit our colonies, we should gradually civilise Africa. He submitted to their Lordships that there were sufficient grounds for these measures which had been introduced by Her Majesty's Government, and that they were not liable to the censure which had been cast upon them.
§ House in Committee. Bill reported.
§ House adjourned.