The Isolated Position Of The Plantations Renders Their Execution Impossible.

They pre-suppose a system of domestic inquisition incompatible with what is understood in the colonies by the phrase established rights.

The state of slavery cannot be altogether peaceably ameliorated except by the simultaneous action of the free men (white men and coloured) residing in the West Indies; by colonial assemblies and legislatures; by the influence of those who, enjoying great moral consideration among their countrymen and acquainted with the localities, know how to vary the means of improvement conformably with the manners, habits, and the position of every island. In preparing the way for the accomplishment of this task, which ought to embrace a great part of the archipelago of the West Indies, it may be useful to cast a retrospective glance on the events by which the freedom of a considerable part of the human race was obtained in Europe in the middle ages. In order to ameliorate without commotion new institutions must be made, as it were, to rise out of those which the barbarism of centuries has consecrated. It will one day seem incredible that until the year 1826 there existed no law in the Great Antilles to prevent the sale of young infants and their separation from their parents, or to prohibit the degrading custom of marking the negroes with a hot iron, merely to enable these human cattle to be more easily recognized. Enact laws to obviate the possibility of a barbarous outrage; fix, in every sugar estate, the proportion between the least number of negresses and that of the labouring negroes; grant liberty to every slave who has served fifteen years, to every negress who has reared four or five children; set them free on the condition of working a certain number of days for the profit of the plantation; give the slaves a part of the net produce, to interest them in the increase of agricultural riches;* fix a sum on the budget of the public funds, destined for the ransom of slaves, and the amelioration of their condition - such are the most urgent objects for colonial legislation. (* General Lafayette, whose name is linked with all that promises to contribute to the liberty of man and the happiness of mankind, conceived, in the year 1785, the project of purchasing a settlement at Cayenne, and to divide it among the blacks by whom it was cultivated and in whose favour the proprietor renounced for himself and his descendants all benefit whatever. He had interested in this noble enterprise the priests of the Mission of the Holy Ghost, who themselves possessed lands in French Guiana. A letter from Marshal de Castries, dated 6th June, 1785, proves that the unfortunate Louis XVI, extending his beneficent intentions to the blacks and free men of colour, had ordered similar experiments to be made at the expense of Government. M. de Richeprey, who was appointed by M. de Lafayette to superintend the partition of the lands among the blacks, died from the effects of the climate at Cayenne.)

The Conquest on the continent of Spanish America and the slave-trade in the West Indies, in Brazil, and in the southern parts of the United States, have brought together the most heterogeneous elements of population. This strange mixture of Indians, whites, negroes, mestizos, mulattoes and zambos is accompanied by all the perils which violent and disorderly passion can engender, at those critical periods when society, shaken to its very foundations, begins a new era. At those junctures, the odious principle of the Colonial System, that of security, founded on the hostility of castes, and prepared during ages, has burst forth with violence. Fortunately the number of blacks has been so inconsiderable in the new states of the Spanish continent that, with the exception of the cruelties exercised in Venezuela, where the royalist party armed their slaves, the struggle between the independents and the soldiers of the mother country was not stained by the vengeance of the captive population. The free men of colour (blacks, mulattoes and mestizoes) have warmly espoused the national cause; and the copper-coloured race, in its timid distrust and passiveness, has taken no part in movements from which it must profit in spite of itself. The Indians, long before the revolution, were poor and free agriculturists; isolated by their language and manners they lived apart from the whites. If, in contempt of Spanish laws, the cupidity of the corregidores and the tormenting system of the missionaries often restricted their liberty, that state of vexatious oppression was far different from personal slavery like that of the slavery of the blacks, or of the vassalage of the peasantry in the Sclavonian part of Europe. It is the small number of blacks, it is the liberty of the aboriginal race, of which America has preserved more than eight millions and a half without mixture of foreign blood, that characterizes the ancient continental possessions of Spain, and renders their moral and political situation entirely different from that of the West Indies, where, by the disproportion between the free men and the slaves, the principles of the Colonial System have been developed with more energy. In the West Indian archipelago as in Brazil (two portions of America which contain near 3,200,000 slaves) the fear of [?] among the blacks, and the perils that surround the whites, have been hitherto the most powerful causes of the security of the mother countries and of the maintenance of the Portuguese dynasty. Can this security, from its nature, be of long duration? Does it justify the inertness of governments who neglect to remedy the evil while it is yet time? I doubt this. When, under the influence of extraordinary circumstances, alarm is mitigated, when countries in which the accumulation of slaves has produced in society the fatal mixture of heterogeneous elements may be led, perhaps unwillingly, into an exterior struggle, civil dissensions will break forth in all their violence and European families, innocent of an order of things which they have had no share in creating, will be exposed to the most imminent dangers.

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