Page:On the motion of Sir George Strickland; for the abolition of the negro apprenticeship.djvu/69

61 "I confess I deeply regret that the circumstances which have led to the present inquiry, instead of having been brought under the notice of her Majesty's government for the first time in a pamphlet printed and circulated in this country, were not fully stated to you in Jamaica when they first came to the knowledge of the parties, through whom they have at last happily transpired. Had this course been adopted, the dismissal of Mr. Rawlinson would have taken place at a much earlier period, and the authentic statement of the written disclosures, contained in the evidence now before me, would long since have supplied a motive and laid a foundation for a more complete remedy than it has yet been in the power of the government to provide against the recurrence of such enormous abuses."

And Sir Lionel Smith writes, dating 16 July, 1837, (see p. 271 of the same papers,)

"It would be puerile in me to complain of the want of personal courtesy in Joseph Sturge, but I do complain of his want of confidence in me to put him in the way of the best information.

"I should have felt obliged to Joseph Sturge if he had told me of any abuses he had discovered in our system towards the apprentices."

In illustration of the natural liability of all ex parte statements to the grossest exaggerations, I cannot avoid quoting the following passage from the Times of Feb. 27.

"Lord Brougham was certain, that if he had found amongst the records of cruelty in the colonies a passage like the present—if he had found that children of four, five, and seven years of age, answering to six, seven, and nine in this cold climate, had been sentenced to years of solitary confinement, under the authority of a colonial secretary, or under the authority of those appointed by and responsible to him—if he had found that children of those tender years had been shut up for months and years in solitude, he could not have found a climax more appropriate for his closing appeal, in the narration of cruelty which he had given to the House; but there was nothing so bad as the present case in the records of West India Slavery."