It
was the duty of the House to protect the planters, whose lives had been,
and were then, exposed to imminent dangers, and whose property had
undergone an unmerited depreciation. To what could this depreciation, and
to what could the late insurrection at Dominica, be imputed, which had been
saved from horrid carnage and midnight-butchery only by the adventitious
arrival of two British regiments? They could only be attributed to the long
delayed question of the abolition of the Slave-trade; and if this question
were to go much longer unsettled, Jamaica would be endangered also.
To members of landed property he would observe, that the abolition would
lessen the commerce of the country, and increase the national debt and the
number of their taxes. The minister, he hoped, who patronized this wild
scheme, had some new pecuniary resource in store to supply the deficiencies
it would occasion.
To the mercantile members he would speak thus: "A few ministerial men in
the house had been gifted with religious inspiration, and this had been
communicated to other eminent personages in it: these enlightened
philanthropists had discovered, that it was necessary, for the sake of
humanity and for the honour of the nation, that the merchants concerned in
the African trade should be persecuted, notwithstanding the sanction of
their trade by parliament, and notwithstanding that such persecution must
aggrandize the rivals of Great Britain.
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