Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/231

 home to their families, satisfied with their vote, after they had been once made acquainted with the subject.

Mr. Matthew Montagu rose, and said a few words in support of the motion; and after condemning the trade in the strongest manner, he declared, that as long as he had life, he would use every faculty of his body and mind in endeavoring to promote its abolition.

Lord John Russell succeeded Mr Montagu. lie said that although slavery was repugnant to his feelings, he must vote against the abolition, as visionary and delusive. It was a feeble attempt without the power to serve the cause of humanity. Other nations would take up the trade. Whenever a bill of wise regulations should be brought forward, no man would be more ready than himself to lend his support. In this way the rights of humanity might be asserted without injury to others. He hoped he should not incur censure hy his vote; for, let his understanding be what it might, he did not know that he had, notwithstanding the assertions of Mr. Fox, an inaccessible heart.

Mr. William Smith remarked: That the slaves were exposed to great misery in the islands, was true as well from inference as from facts; for what might not be expected from the use of arbitrary power, where the three characters of party, judge, and executioner were united 1 The slaves, too, were more capable on account of their passions, than the beasts of the field, of exciting the passions of their tyrants. To what a length the ill treatment of them might be carried, might be learnt from the instance which General Tottenham mentioned to have seen in the year 1780, in the streets of Bridge Town, Barbadoes: "A youth about nineteen, (to use his own words in the evidence,) entirely naked, with an iron collar about his neck, having five long projecting spikes. His body, both before and behind, was covered with wounds. His belly and thighs were almost cut to pieces, with running ulcers all over them; and a finger might have been laid in some of the weals. He could not sit down, because his hinder part was mortified; and it was impossible for him to lie down, on account of the prongs of his collar." He supplicated the general for relief. The latter asked who had punished him so dreadfully? The youth answered his master had done it. And because he could not work, this same master, in the same spirit of perversion which extorts from scripture a justification of the slave-trade, had fulfilled the apostolic maxim, that he should have nothing to eat. The use he meant to make of this instance, was to show the unprotected state of the slaves. What must it be where such an instance could pass not only unpunished, but almost unregarded? If, in the streets of London, but a dog were to be seen lacerated like this miserable man, hew would the cruelty of the wretch be execrated, who had thus even abused a brute!

The judicial punishments also inflicted upon the negro showed the low estimation in which, in consequence of the strength of old customs and deep-rooted prejudices, they were held. Mr. Edwards, in his speech to the assembly at Jamaica, stated the following case, as one which had happened in one of the rebellions there. Some slaves had surrounded the dwelling-house of their mistress. She was in bed with a lovely infant. They deliberated upon the means