few weeks he has accomplished. The country was at rest-political excitement had subsided-that wise policy to which last year this house bore an attestation so signal, had produced the most salutary fruits. No public meetings were held, the tithe question had been adjusted, and the veryname of a measure, to Englishmen of all others the most obnoxious, was scarcely uttered. A general calmpre vailed. Suddenly the noble lord bursts like a hurricane upon us. The elements of confusion are at once let loose, and the country is swept back into that tempestuous agitation from which we deemed ourselves secure. Stop, while there is yet time-stop the noble lord in his career of mischief, or the consequences may be irretrievable. You may gain a temporary triumph; you may rob us of the fruits of that emancipation which the itinerant incendiaries invite you openly and directly to rescind; but your victories will be dearly purchased. Of Irelandof organised, confederated, discontented Ireland, beware; beware of that country which you ought to have been instructed by experience, fearful, if not humiliating, not to hold in disregard. Twelve months have scarcely passed since the member for Tamworth declared that Ireland presented to him his greatest difficulty. Will that difficulty be diminished by the sinister co-operation of his noble and exceedingly formidable friend? Persevere in that policy by which this measure had been prompted, and Ireland will soon be in a condition more fearful than that which preceded emancipation. You will enter again into an encounter with that gigantic agitation by which you were before discomfited, and by which (for its power is treble) you will be again overthrown; for all the consequences that will ensue from the excitement which you will have wantonly engendered, you will be responsible: you will be responsible for the calamities which will gush in, in abundance so disastrous, from the sources of bitterness which you will have unsealed. If Ireland shall be arrested in the march of improvement in which she has been under a Whig government rapidly advancing if Ireland shall be thrown back fifty years-if the value of property shall be impaired if the security of property shall be shaken -if political animosities shall be embittered-if religious detestations shall become more rabid and more envenomed-if the mind of Ireland shall become one heated mass, ready to catch fire at a single spark; for all this you will be responsible. And do not think that it is to Ireland that the evil effects of your impolicy will be confined. If in this country the fell spirit of democracy which lately appeared amongst you shall be resuscitated, I do not think that to your Irish garrison (for what will your army be but a garrison?) you can with confidence look for succour. There is reason, too, to apprehend that the state of

Ireland may affect you in your foreign relations-that England will not maintain the post and dignity that become her-that foreign cabinets may take advantage of our intestine dissensions to exact from us humiliating conditions—and that thus, to the maintenance of Protestant ascendancy in a distracted province, you will sacrifice the ascendancy of England through the world. It is of that ascendancy, that better, nobler, and more exalted ascendancy, that I am the advocate; and it is because I am so, because I am as devoted to the maintenance of the glory, the honour, and the power of this great country, as if I were born among yourselves, and from my birth had breathed no other air than you have-it is for this that I am solicitous that you should not relinquish one of the noblest means of its sustainment, and that I warn you not to hazard the affections, the warm, devoted, enthusiastic affections of millions of high-minded and high-hearted men; but to preserve, in a spirit of wise conservation, the great moral bulwark which you find in those affections-which does not form an item in your estimates, which is so cheap that it costs nothing but justice, and which, as long as you shall retain, so long, against every evil that may befal you, your empire will be impregnably secure.

THE SUGAR DUTIES.

SPEECH IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, MAY 18, 1841.

THE department with which I have the honour to be connected, (the Board of Trade) will afford me a justification for interfering in this debate; it has been protracted beyond the ordinary period of the duration of our debates, but not to a period incommensurate with the importance the incalculable importance, of a subject upon which, in the exercise of their appellate jurisdiction, the people of England must ultimately decide. I shall not trespass upon the indulgence of those who surround me, or upon the forbearance of those to whom I am opposed, at any inappropriate length. I shall confine myself to the resolution of the noble lord, and do my best to avoid the example of those who have wandered far away from it, and who have indulged in dissertations not more mysterious to their auditors than to themselves. I shall, Sir, in the first instance, address myself to that branch of the question in reference to which, the people of England, the virtuous and humane people of England, feel a deep and a most honourable concern. If, Sir, to the progress of the slave-trade, by an exorbitant differential duty between colonial and foreign sugar, any effectual impediment were interposed-if, notwithstanding that exorbitant differential duty, the slave-trade were not successful to an extent which has been stated, with too much justice, in the course of this debate, to cast a stain upon Christian Europe-if to slave-grown sugar every port upon the Continent were not thrown widely and indiscriminately open-if with the produce of slave-labour in many forms, coffee, cotton, tobacco, our own markets were not glutted-if we were not ourselves the importers, the refiners, and the re-exporters of slavegrown sugar to the Continent, ay, and to our own colonial possessions, to an enormous annual amount, I am free to confess that with regard to the propriety of making a reduction of a differential duty, thus supposed for a moment, for the purposes of humanity as well as of monopoly, to be effectual, I should be disposed to entertain a doubt. But, Sir, when I consider that in checking the progress of the slavetrade, the safeguard of monopoly is utterly without avail-when I consider that the differential duty, which keeps the price of sugar up, does not keep the price of human beings down-when I consider that without casting upon a barbarous traffic any, the slightest impediment, the differential duty has the effect of impairing the public revenue, and, by enhancing the cost of one of the necessaries of life, of im

ral;

posing upon the humbler classes of the community, a grievous charge— when I consider that the differential duty confers no substantial benefit upon any class of the community, excepting upon those benevolent monopolists whose sensibilities are not unprompted by their profits, and who, to the emotions of a lucrative philanthropy, find it as easy, as it is convenient, whenever a purpose, personal or political is to be promoted, to give way--I am at a loss, I own, to discover any just motive for giving sustainment to a monopoly fraught with so much multifarious evil, or for supporting the resolution of the noble lord. That resolution is conceived in a spirit of such obvious partisanship that I cannot withhold the expression of my surprise that my right honourable and most distinguished friend, the member for the Tower Hamlets, should have considered it to be consistent with his unaffected abhorrence of slavery (for his abhorrence of slavery is unaffected) to give it his support. It does not require his sagacity, forensic, judicial, and senatorial, to perceive that this resolution is little else than a sort of previous question in disguise; it contains no pledge against the future introduction of slave-grown sugar---it is transitory and ephemeit provides a ready retreat from the high ground which the new, I should rather say, the novel associates of my right honourable friend in the cause of freedom, have so vauntingly taken up, and while it states, that the House of Commons is not prepared (no-not yet prepared) to recognise the introduction of slave-grown sugar, it intimates that under happier auspices, through that preparátory process, the House of Commons may be prevailed upon to pass. How little does this resolution, dexterous, adroit, and almost crafty, accord with the frank, the ingenuous, and, in the cause of virtue, the ardent and impassioned character of my right honourable friend. If any doubt could be entertained regarding the object and the effect of such a resolution, it would be removed by the speech of the noble lord, the member for North Lancashire, who declared again and again, that for the present a great experiment ought not to be disturbed. Surely this ought to convince my right honourable friend, who will forgive me, I feel convinced, if I am bold enough to tell him that in supporting a resolution, couched in such phraseology as this is, he is almost as inconsistent as those incongruous sentimentalists by whom, provided it be not presented in a saccharine form, the produce of slave-labour is unscrupulously consumed. But from personal and innocuous inconsistencies, let me pass to the anomalies, which are incidental to our fiscal system. Last year we imported upwards of 28 million pounds of slave coffee, of which upwards of 14 millions were slave-grown. The noble lord the member for Lancashire, struggling with this overcoming fact,

suggested that to the supply of the coffee-market our colonies were not adequate. The noble lord seems to think that the encouragement of the slave-trade is matter of mercantile expediency, and that on the price-current our philanthropy ought to depend, and our markets should be opened or shut to slave-grown produce as they rose or fell. It is quite true that when the duty upon coffee was high---was ls. 7d. per pound---the consumption was so inconsiderable that the colonies supplied us with all the coffee which we required; but when the duty was lowered, the consumption increased to an extent which, without exaggeration, may be designated as enormous. It is worth while to look with some minuteness into the effect which the diminution of duty produced upon the importation of coffee. The following table is remarkable.

From this table it is manifest, that by the reduction of duty an enormous augmentation in the importation of coffee was produced. In 1807, when the duty was 1s. 7d. no more than 1,170,164 pounds of coffee were imported, the revenue was no more than £161,245; and when the duty was reduced, the importation of coffee rose to the vast amount of 28,723,735 pounds of coffee, and the revenue produced was £922,862. I repeat, that of this vast mass of coffee, more than 14 million pounds were slave-grown. But this anomaly, great as it is, is little when compared with the monstrous incongruity of receiving slavegrown sugar in bond, of refining and exporting it, and at the same time, of excluding it from the home market, where, upon its consumption, a duty might be raised. In 1840 we imported upwards of eight hundred thousand hundred-weight of slave-grown sugar-it was refined and exported. What revenue was raised upon it? Not a single shilling, while all the expenses incidental to the bonding system were incurred in its regard. By no one could such a system be sustained, except by the noble lord the member for North Lancashire, by whom an elaborate vindication of these anomalies was fearlessly un