Owing To The Progressive Amelioration Of The State Even Of The Captive Caste In The Island Of Cuba, The Luxury

Of the masters and the possibility of gain by their work, have drawn more than eighty thousand slaves to the

Towns; and the manumission of them, favoured by the wisdom of the laws, is become so active as to have produced, at the present period, more than 130,000 free men of colour. By considering the individual position of each class, by recompensing, by the decreasing scale of privations, intelligence, love of labour and the domestic virtues, the colonial administration will find the best means of improving the condition of the blacks. Philanthropy does not consist in giving a little more salt-fish, and some fewer lashes: the real amelioration of the captive caste ought to extend over the whole moral and physical position of man.

The impulse may be given by those European governments which have a right comprehension of human dignity, and who know that whatever is unjust bears with it a germ of destruction; but this impulse, it is melancholy to add, will be powerless if the union of the planters, if the colonial assemblies or legislatures, fail to adopt the same views and to act by a well-concerted plan, having for its ultimate aim the cessation of slavery in the West Indies. Till then it will be in vain to register the strokes of the whip, to diminish the number that may be given at one time, to require the presence of witnesses and to appoint protectors of slaves; all these regulations, dictated by the most benevolent intentions, are easily eluded: 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.

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