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    case , and he might fairly demand compensation for ail the labour previously forced from him . And those who argue , that as emancipation is a thing put in force for the benefit of the nation , the nation is thereby bound as a matter of right to be at all the

    expense of compensation , are also wrong in principle . The nation , it is true , made laws , which permitted the possession of slaves , and the operations consequent upon their possession , and laws also have been made authorizing the possession of land . When the nation takes the land of individuals for the national use ,

    compensation is made ; but in this case the article in question is turned to the profit of the nation . In the case of the slaves , it is not a seizure of property , but merely a restitution to the slave of that freedom of which he had previously been unjustly deprived . But though the slave-holders have no legal or moral claim to

    compensation , as a matter of right , they have a claim to consideration on the score of humanity and of public utility . They also have sustained an injury by the operation of mischievous laws . They have been induced to embark property in stolen goods , which goods the law had led them to believe were honestly come by , and they have moreover suffered a consequent demoralization , which has unfitted them to get a living in other ways . It would be unjust and cruel to turn out disbanded soldiers or sailors to

    starve , and ruined slave-owners would be in the same condition . Those who acknowledge the force of this argument , allege that they are only entitled to workhouse allowance , but this would only be another form of cruelty . In speaking of those who will suffer pecuniary distress by emancipation , I do not allude to the residents

    on the islands , the overseers and attorneys , and the whole tribe of actual negro coercers , who are for the most part coarse-minded people , without claims upon the property , and quite capable of procuring their own subsistence by other employments . The proprietors of West India estates are rarely residents upon them . They are for the most part in the situation of the Irish absentee

    proprietary . I believe it will be found that there are few cases of large incomes arising to individual proprietors from this source—the attorneys and agents are the principal gainers . Probabl y there are many instances of families who are barely supported , by incomes of from one to three hundred pounds per annum , and who have been in the habit of receiving . their quarterly payments , as others do from the public funds , without exactly knowing by what process they

    came to them , beyond the hands of the clerk or merchant who was the immediate agent . These then are the people who would suffer , and to turn whom upon the parish would be extreme cruelty . Now , if compensation is to be given to them , —and humanity imperatively requires it—the amount should be regulated by the diminution of income they may sustain in consequence of emancipation , and not according to the arbitrary value which may be set upon each slave according to the notion of the valuers ,

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    Abolition of Negro Slavery . 469

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1833, page 469, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2618/page/29/