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Rh to England, called it "a splendid work, which would endear their remembrance to posterity;" but Lord Bathurst was highly dissatisfied with the new code. Yet Jamaica and Demerara, with the Mauritius, seem on the whole to have been the worst colonies. The missionary Smith well earned his murder from the planters by his plain remonstrances against the cruel treatment of slaves. "If it be asked," said he, "are there not authorities to whom the injured slaves can appeal for redress? Yes; but many of these are owners of plantations, and perhaps allow their managers to practise the same abuses. It would seem that some of them consider it a greater crime in the negroes to complain of their wrongs, than in the master to inflict them. The complainants are almost sure to be flogged, and frequently before the complaint is investigated, unless indeed listening to the master be called investigation. But even where the justice of the complaint is undeniable, the result is often such that the negroes cannot tell whether the law is made to protect the oppressed or to indemnify the oppressor." No wonder that the planters did not like missionaries! The Rev. Mr. Austin of Demerara, a respected clergyman, who was made a member of the court of inquiry concerning the insurrection, attested that the instructions given to the negroes by Mr. Smith had eminently tended to prevent bloodshed; indeed, had actually saved the lives of men who were now seeking Mr. Smith's life. Yet, on the whole, the judgment of Mr. Knibb, a Baptist missionary in Jamaica, seems to be sound. He said that where a negro accepts the gospel spiritually, it softens and tranquillizes him; but the enlightening power to the intellect, which all teaching gives, goes wider abroad than the spiritualizing power. To learn something of the outer world, of its nations and its powers; to reflect on themselves and their slavish relation to one equally mortal, equally responsible to God; to see and feel how different was the missionary's behavior to them from that of their master — had all an electric effect, not contributing to the stability of slavery. The planters of Demerara answered Lord Bathurst's circular defiantly; declared that their right in their slave property was as complete as any one's right to any property, and claimed to send deputies to England to argue to this effect before the king in council. Lord Bathurst and his colleagues would probably have been satisfied if they could have won for the slaves just the most elementary rights, such as, that a husband should have his own wife sacred to him, that the honor of girls should be safe, that the whip should not be used indiscriminately, nor cruelly, nor at all to females, that young children should not be taken away from the mother, that the evidence of slaves and black men should be heard in court, that all judicial sentences should be strictly just, and no punishment excessive or peculiar, such as rubbing pepper into the eyes and salt into wounds; but not one point could be made sure. The planters were willing, for instance, to concede to slaves a nominal marriage, but only with the addition, "provided that in no way it prejudice the owner's rights." Of course to make the wife an object inviolable to the owner's will, or to forbid his selling her away, did prejudice his fancied rights. Slaves were heard in court, but not only were not believed when they complained, they were far oftener punished for complaining; while if a pretext were wanted for punishing (perhaps hanging) a slave for an alleged scheme of insurrection, the evidence of a single slave was greedily accepted and acted upon. Thus the ministers were checkmated in their schemes of gradual, moderate, judicious reform, and perhaps lamented too late that Lord Melville's scheme of freeing all children born after a near date had been opposed.

In the year 1828 a judicial sentence was pronounced that much afflicted Abolitionists. A negro woman of Antigua, called Grace, had visited England and returned to Antigua; and the question arose, whether after becoming free by touching English soil (such was the faulty way of putting the case) she could be seized as a slave in Antigua. It fell to Lord Stowell, a revered and venerable judge in the Admiralty Court, to pronounce on this matter. He was elder brother of the lord chancellor Eldon, both of them intense haters of novelty, under whatever pretext of reform. If the advocate of the woman had alleged that the fact of English courts accounting her free proved that her original slavery was an illegal piece of violence, Lord Stowell might have been forced to another decision; but, conveniently for him, that topic was not mooted. He argued in his award, that "innumerable acts of Parliament that regulate the condition of slaves tend to consider them as mere goods and chattels constituting part of the value of estates;" that "colonial slavery has been 