Page:On the motion of Sir George Strickland; for the abolition of the negro apprenticeship.djvu/59

51 to be an eternal slavery. It is the demand which creates the supply; it has been the demand for cotton to support and extend your manufactures, under which slaves have been multiplied in America, and which has made the breeding trade in the northern slave-states, and the carrying trade towards the southern slave-states, and the vast increase of the entire servile population. You consumed forty-five millions of pounds of cotton in 1837, which proceeded from free labour; and, proceeding from slave labour, three hundred and eighteen millions of pounds! And this, while the vast regions of India afford the means of obtaining, at a cheaper rate, and by a slight original outlay to facilitate transport, all that you can require. If, Sir, the complaints against the general body of West Indians had been substantiated, I should have deemed it an unworthy artifice to attempt diverting the attention of the House from the question immediately at issue, by merely proving that other delinquencies existed in other quarters; but feeling as I do, that those charges have been overthrown in debate, I think myself entitled and bound to show how capricious are honourable gentlemen in the distribution of their sympathies among those different objects which call for their application.

And now, Sir, I have completed my long and wearisome detail, and I commit this weighty question, with the utmost confidence, to the justice of a British Parliament. I ask for justice alone, and to