feeling of uneasiness and discontent been observable among the Indian labourers on your estate as arising out of separation from their families, or from any other similar cause?" The answer is signed Bickagee; and this name seems to indicate a Malabar origin; so that probably the reason why the account is so different from that of other proprietors may be, that Bickagee could converse with the poor Indians in their own language, as another witness who gives a similar account certainly could. The answer is "Yes; and for these reasons-In their country they live happy and comfortable with their wives and families, on three or four rupees a month. They engage to leave their native country on a small increase of salary, say five rupees and rations, in the hope of receiving the same comfort here, but experience has proved the reverse. Uneasiness and discontent arise from these privations, besides their being deprived of the holidays their religion entitles them to." (p. 83.) So Mr. Scott, a gentleman resident in Bengal, and acquainted with the people, their language, and habits, plainly says, that "with very rare exceptions, he doubts if there are any who congratulate themselves on the bargain they have made." (125.) He makes an observation of much wisdom upon the inefficacy of all regulations respecting treatment, and of all conditions in contracts for apprenticeship. "The main result of my enquiry," says he, "leads me to the conclusion, that the condition of the labourer practically depends on the individual character of his employer, and that the terms of the agreements are trifling compared with the spirit in which they are interpreted." But let us look to the far more pressing consideration of the way in which these poor people are brought over from their own country; for upon that, two very important matters arise out of these papers, and espe cially Mr. Scott's report. I must, however, first turn aside for a moment to show your lordships that the abuses of the measure had not been unforeseen. My noble friend himself at one time was awake to this important consideration. He could see it in the measures of others, but in his own, all such suspicions are lulled asleep. When he first received the ordinance made by the Court of Policy in Demerara, he at once warned them against letting it become the cover for Slave dealing, describing it as essential that no apprentice from Africa should be brought over. His words are remarkable, and I apply them distinctly to the measure of my noble friend himself, now under your consideration. "If, (said he, in a despatch dated October 3, 1836, p. 11,) labourers should be recruited on any part of the African coast, the consequence would inevitably be direct encouragement to the Slave trade in the interior, and a plausible, if not a just, reproach against this country of insincerity in our professions on that subject." A plausible, if not a just reproach! Truly the reproach is still more just than it is plausible; and so my noble friend's colleague,* under whom the foreign concerns of this country flourish as much as our colonial affairs do under himself, will find in the first attempt which he may make to treat for the abolition of the foreign Slave traffic. I can tell him that far less ingenuity than falls to the lot of Spanish, and above all Portuguese negotiators, will be required to shut his mouth with this Order in Council, as soon as he tries to open it against the Portuguese or Spanish enormities which all England, and both Houses of its Parliament, are vociferously urging him to put down. They will hold, and truly, that they have a just right to tax us "Lord Palmerston. with insincerity, and with fraud and dishonesty, if, while we affect to reprobate Slave trading in them under its own name, we continue to carry it on ourselves, under false pretences, and by a false and borrowed title. As long as Africans are brought over under the vile Order by the name of apprenticed labourers, it is still more just than it is plausible to accuse us of that insincerity and those frauds; and how does my noble friend* escape the charge? By a regulation which he adds to the ordinance, and which I pledge myself instantly to demonstrate does nothing whatever to prevent the very thing here denounced. Nothing of the kind, absolutely nothing has been done by the additional provision of my noble friend. For what is that provision? You will find it in page twentyone, and it only makes indentures of apprenticeship void if executed in Africa, or the adjacent islands inhabited wholly or in part by the Negro race. Why, what signifies that? Who is prevented by such a flimsy folly as that article, from carrying over as many Africans as he pleases, and in whatever way he likes? To escape this most ridiculous check, the Slave trader (my noble friend himself calls him by this name) has only to take the Negroes on board of the Slave-ships, and there execute their indentures, or to Brazil, or to Cuba, or to Monte Video, or, indeed, to Guiana itself; and then he complies with the conditions of this inconceivable restriction, and imports as many Negroes as he pleases, and can afford to buy. To be sure, there is added another provision of the same notable kind, requiring that all contracts be made and witnessed before two justices, or, it is added, magistrates. What then? The Slave trader has only to carry his prey, his human victims, to the Mauritius, where he will * Lord Glenelg. find two, aye, twenty, magistrates full ready to help him, and to do any thing for the encouragement of the business there most popular, the Slave trade; or if it be the western coast of Africa which he has been desolating with his traffic, under the encouragement of this Order in Council, he has only to touch at the Brazils, where all Slave traders are at home; or at Monte Video, where the governor took a bribe of £10,000 to allow, in the teeth of the Spanish law, two thousand Slaves, which he termed, in the language of these papers, and this Order in Council, labourers, to be introduced; or at Cuba, where the governor does not suffer the sailing of Slave ships to be announced in the newspapers, for fear of our cruisers being thereby warned and stopping them. In all these Slave trading ports, justices, and magistrates, and governors too, will ever be ready to witness indentures for Guiana, and make this most ludicrous provision utterly void and of no effect. But the despatches of my noble friend are not the only documents which show that the abuses of this intercourse have been alluded to before now-though no precautions whatever have been adopted to prevent them. Some few years ago, a Mr. Letord propounded to the governor of the Mauritius a plan for importing twenty thousand African labourers, as he called them, in the phraseology of the Order in Council so familiar to all Slave traders. He was to obtain them by negotiation with the chiefs of the country, and to apprentice them for a limited time. His plan was circumstantially and elaborately framed, and reminds me of what a learned friend of mine, now Advocate-general in Bengal,* used to say at Guildhall, on such estimates, that with a little pen and ink he would under * Mr. Pearson. take by figures to pay the national debt in half an hour. The ingenious projector, (who I understand was one of those most deeply concerned in the Mauritian Slave-trading some time ago, and therefore well versed in the subject,) gave his plan the name of Projet d'Emancipation Africane"-for he was of course to liberate all the Slaves he bought of the chiefs, or kidnapped on his own account, and to convert them, as the plan of our government proposes, into Indentured Apprentices. Your lordships smile at the plan and its title, because you see through the trick at once-so did the worthy Governor General Nicolay-whose answer was short-whose refusal was flat and unqualified-just such as the Government at home should have given to the Letords of Guiana. He said he had read the details of the plan "with much interest, and felt bound to give it his unqualified refusal, considering it, however speciously coloured, as neither more nor less than a renewal of the Slave trade, and therefore entirely inadmissible," p. 24. And so to be sure it was. Your lordships saw through the cunning trick and its flimsy disguise at once, and you smiled when I stated it. But I now ask if there is one single tittle of the plan thus instantly seen through, which differs from the present project for Guiana? I defy the most ingenious, subtle, and astute person who now hears me to show any one thing that could have been done under Letord's plan, denounced by Sir W. Nicolay, as common Slave-trading-in other words felony-which may not be done exactly in the same manner if this Order in Council is suffered to continue in operation. My noble friend will answer me and defend or explain his measure. I call upon him to point out, if he can, one single particular in which the project rejected as felonious by Governor Nicolay, with the entire approval of the Government |