If the framers of the measure had interrogated managers or overseers as to the length of time and the close attention it requires to understand the character of the negroes, even of a moderately-sized gang, they would have little thought of expecting a single public officer to remedy the difficulty.
But if the protectors were multiplied from one to a thousand, and did nothing else but watch over the individual character of the slaves, the remedy must be fallacious. On the broad principle of the measure itself, no system of appraisement, no reference to previous character, can meet the artifices which a slave may employ to depreciate his value; because many of such artifices, depending on the suppression of skill or zeal, being of a negative character, defy detection; and, even were they detected, detriment to the proprietor’s interests must ensue, since a willing has been changed into a discontented labourer.
Upon the rising generation, too, of the negroes, the operation of the same baneful policy of self-deterioration must increase. The whole of the youthful class, whose faculties are just dawning, will be taught to suppress everything like acuteness, and to stifle every indication of future habits of industry.
Compulsory manumission, therefore, contains the worst principle of evil, a principle of growth. Each succeeding year will make more evident to the negroes the means with which they have been invested for self-depreciation; and each additional instance of its successful adoption by their fellows encourage numbers to resort to the same pernicious artifices.
How miserable, then, is the expedient of partially questioning certain individuals in the colonies, who, thus interrogated, may pronounce that in the present condition of the slaves the measure would be inoperative, while the same persons, if questioned with a view to the future effects of the measure after ten or fifteen years of its adoption, would predict a widely different result!
The writer of the “Remarks” seems unwilling to contemplate the future, and condemns prospective arguments as speculative and merely matter of opinion. But if the negro prefer a state of idleness to one of constrained exertion, it follows that he must earnestly desire to obtain his freedom. If he have repugnance to labour, he will seek his freedom by those means which are easiest. If he possess common reason, he must perceive that the easiest of all methods lies in self-depreciation.
Would it not, then, be contrary to all principles of equity or sound legislation, to subject what is thus a self-evident proposition to the test of experiment, since, ere the result of that experiment could be ascertained, irreparable injury must have been produced?
In reality, a part only of the subject has been treated of in Lord Bathurst’s despatch, and in the “Remarks,” inasmuch as they regard only those negroes who may be freed under the operation of the measure, and overlook those who, from inability to procure their freedom, still remain on the plantation.
But it has been shown, that greater deterioration of property may occur from an improper feeling excited among the negroes who remain, than from the more direct loss of labour occasioned by the abstraction of those who become free.