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benefit , and out of that fund should come the expenses of judges , magistrates , police , teachers , troops , &c , as well as poor ' s rates for infants , and the unfortunate destitutes , who cannot be many in a land vvhererto scratch the earth is to produce a crop . Much talk has been bandied about the value of the West India
colonies to England ; but the fact is , that so far as any pecuniary advantage is concerned , it would be a fortunate thing for England if the whole of the Antilles were sunk beneath the waters of the Atlantic . People talk of the sugar trade , and ask with the utmost simplicity what we should do without sugar ? The answer to this is , if the Antilles did not produce it , other parts of the world would . And what if there were no sugar at all ? There was an
nge in the world when people had it not , and yet contrived to grow up tall , and straight , and goodly ; and it is scarcely to be supposed , that the world would be extinguished , even though the sugar-cane were totally lost . Besides , the world is older than it was , and were sugar suddenly to vanish from us under the present processes , it would be so desirable a thing to regain it , that chemists would set to work with the prospect of an enormous
gam before them , in case they could produce a substitute . At one time it was prophesied that the French nation could no longer carry on war for want of salt-petre , but they eventually found a remedy ; and such will be the case with sugar whenever human beings shall resolve that they will not destroy their bodies prematurely , by the cultivation and preparation of a gigantic grass . As
a matter of mere interest , therefore , the wisest thing England could do ,, would be to withdraw her troops , and leave both whites and blacks in the West Indies to settle their quarrels as they best could ; but the question is not one of interest , but of humanity , and for the sake of humanity it is , that Englishmen will be willing to add to their burdens by the payment of fresh taxes if necessary . But it would be the act of fools , to suffer themselves to be cheated
and plundered , for the gratification of Mr Stanley ' s arbitrary insolence . Twenty millions sterling , though voted by the House of Commons in breathless haste , must not be paid away without knowing to whom , and whether fairly or not , amongst the numberless hands which will be stretched out to receive , while the corresponding mouths will still cry Give , give , * like the daughters of the horse-leech . The only claimants who will be entitled to attention , are the bona-fide proprietors and mortagees , and they
must be compensated in the proportion of the profits which they were actually making , and not by the nominal value of their property . They could not have increased the amount by their own energies ; and they are not entitled to claim anything on account of what their agents annually plundered from them . What they actually had under the existing system , and not what they might have had under a better system , must be the rule to go by . The compensation , or rather the act of charity , being then
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Abolition of Negro Slavery . 473
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No . 79 . 2 h
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1833, page 473, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2618/page/33/
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