LORD BROUGHAM* I have to lay a petition before your Lordships, which I had the honour of receiving just on the eve of the Easter recess, and which well deserves the attention of this House. It proceeds from the colony of Barbadoes, and may most truly be said to contain the representations and the prayers of all the inhabitants. Signed by the President of the Council, the Speaker of the House of Assembly, the Colonial Secretary, the Colonial Treasurer, the Attorney and the Solicitor General, many Members of the Council, and Members of the colonial Parliament—by the lord Bishop of the diocese, Rectors of the Established Church, Ministers of dissenting congregations, some 114 hundreds of proprietors, of merchants, and of professional men—it may most justly be taken as proceeding from the constituted authorities as well as the body of the inhabitants. And of the numberless petitions which I have at various times had the honour of presenting to your Lordships, I can recollect no one that could so truly be said to speak the sense of the whole community, as this does the sense of the most ancient of our settlements in the Caribbean Sea, and all but the most important and most unfortunate.
These colonists approach your Lordships' House with a statement of the grievances, the evils, the intolerable evils, which they suffer from the continuance of the African slave trade, and from the measures unhappily adopted by the mother country nine years ago, regarding the produce of West Indian agriculture. Their statements respecting the slave trade are brief, clear, undeniable, and convincing. Before rehearsing them to your Lordships, let me add that we have a pledge for the sincerity of their professed opinions against the inhumanity of the slave traffic—a pledge hardly necessary when we consider the great respectability of the petitioners, and the high official stations which many of them fill, yet satisfactory as putting an end to all doubt upon the subject—I mean that their interest entirely coincides with the principles they avow. The injury to their property begun by the emancipation, has been consummated by the continued existence of the foreign slave trade, and the permitted importation of the produce which results from it. We had, say they, been, with the utmost difficulty struggling under the transition from the slavery to the freedom of our labourers, when we found all our efforts paralysed by the attraction which the unlimited supply of slaves affords to capital in rival settlements, and the unnatural amount of the produce extracted from their labours (it might have been said their torments) by the lash.
These unfortunate petitioners recite the sad history of the cruel traffic, the scourge always of Africa, now of the West Indies. They represent that it was abolished nearly fifty years ago in the British dominions. The first Act was passed in 1807; but proved ineffectual, because only pecuniary penalties were imposed, and the slave trade was treated merely as contraband. I reckon it well nigh the greatest blessing that has been bestowed upon me, to have succeeded in carrying the Felony Bill, which, treating 115 this execrable traffic as a crime, made it punishable like other felonies, and the enormity—I will not so far slander honest commerce as to call it a trade—became, by the law of the land, what it always had been by every rule of morality and every principle of humanity, a crime of the deepest dye. The Act of 1811 was effectual for its purpose, and Africa, with our Colonies, was rescued from the scourge, as far as our own subjects were concerned. Treaties with foreign powers aimed at its extinction in their dominions also; and to the force of those treaties was added the more effectual force of our cruisers; so that, as long as the war lasted, the detestable traffic was generally put down. But when peace came in 1815, the same right of search and seizure no longer was effectual, and new treaties were entered into, especially with Portugal and Spain. The full and stringent provisions of these important compacts have, by Spain, never been honestly fulfilled—sometimes all but openly violated. It appears, by the report of the Commissary Judge, Mr. Backhouse, that in 1853, there were imported into Cuba, from the African coast, 12,500 negro slaves; and it is certain that in this return there were material omissions; for instance, as many as 2,180 were left out in one month; but both in that year, and in 1854, it is certain that nearer 15,000 than 12,000 were landed in the island. The Brazilian Government affords a striking contrast in this respect to that of Cuba. The traffic had been carried on to a vast extent for many years, and all the efforts of our cruisers had failed to prevent it, though, no doubt, many captures were made. About 50,000 had, one year with another, been landed in Brazil. To that amount this horrid traffic reached in 1849 when the Government was resolved to adopt effectual measures for suppressing it; and next year the importation was reduced to less than a half. In 1851, not above 3,300 were landed; in 1852 from 800 to 1,000; and in 1853, the traffic entirely ceased. The extent to which it had been carried on for so many previous years is unfortunately a proof how insufficient all attempts upon the African coast, or that of Brazil, have proved, and the Cuba traffic which still continues, has given the friends of the abolition reason to doubt if the efforts of our cruisers can greatly diminish, as certainly they cannot extirpate it. Mean while the Spanish Government has refused to declare it piracy, and has 116 taken no steps to suppress it by local measures, like those which have proved so effectual in Brazil. Piracy of the very worst description it undeniably is; and were those who perpetrate it, suffered to be treated as pirates, it could no longer be carried on by any nation, more than the British traffic has been since 1811. But, while the same measures are not pursued with the criminals who supply Cuba with slaves, these petitioners know that all their efforts are vain to sustain the competition of the Spanish planters, and they call upon us to exclude from our markets the produce of slave labour, and apply the only power which we possess, of at once relieving their distress, and extirpating the traffic encouraged by our unhappy policy nine years ago, when, by a gross perversion of the doctrines of free trade, we resolved to obtain cheap sugar at the heavier cost of piracy, and torture, and blood. To that policy I will give none of the names which it so well deserves, speaking as I do in the presence of many who countenanced, and not a few who patronised it. But as I began by expressing my humble thankfulness for having been permitted to carry through the Bill of 1811, which declared this infernal traffic a crime, and consigned its perpetrators to the punishment of felons, so will I close my statement to your Lordships by protesting that for all the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, would I not have had any hand whatever in the dreadful measure of 1846. I move your Lordships that this petition from those who, next to the Africans, have most suffered from it, should be laid upon your table.
Petition read, and ordered to lie on the table.