Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays; Vol. 6 / With a Memoir and Index

by Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay

The great body of the Colonists have resolutely opposed religious instruction; and they are in the right. They know, though their misinformed friends in England do not know, that Christianity and slavery cannot long exist together. We have already given it us our opinion, that the great body of the Negroes can never, while their political state remains the same, be expected to become Christians. But, if that were possible, we are sure that their political state would very speedily be changed. At every step which the Negro makes in the knowledge and discrimination of right and wrong, he will learn to reprobate more and more the system under which he lives. He will not indeed be so prone to engage in rash and foolish tumults; but he will be as willing as he now is to struggle for liberty, and far more capable of struggling with effect. The forms in which Christianity has been at different times disguised, have been often hostile to liberty. But wherever the spirit has surmounted the forms,—in France, during the wars of the Huguenots,—in Holland, during the reign of Philip II.,—in Scotland, at the time of the Reformation,—in England, through the whole contest against the Stuarts, from their accession to their expulsion.—in New-England, through its whole history,—in every place,—in every age,—it lias inspired a hatred of oppression, and a love of freedom! It would be thus in the West-Indies. The attempts which have been made to press a few detached texts into the cause of tyranny, have never produced any extensive effect. Those who cannot refute them by reasoning and comparison, will be hurried forward by the sense of intolerable wrongs, and the madness of wounded affection. All this the Colonists have discovered; and we feel assured that they will never suffer religious instruction to be unreservedly given to the slaves. In that case, the Establishment will degenerate into a job. This is no chimerical apprehension. There have been clergymen in the West-Indies for many years past; and what have they done for the Negroes? In what have they conduced, either to their temporal or to their spiritual welfare? Doubtless there have been respectable men among them. But is it not notorious, that the benefices of the colonies have been repeatedly given to the outcasts of English society,—men whom the inhabitants would not venture to employ as book-keepers, yet whom they desired to retain as boon companions? Any person who will look over the Parliamentary papers which contain the answers returned by the colonial clergy to certain queries sent out a few years ago by Lord Bathurst, will see some curious instances of the ignorance, the idleness, and the levity of that body. Why should the new Establishment be less corrupt than the old? The dangers to which it is exposed are the same; we do not see that its securities are much greater. It has Bishops, no doubt; and when we observe that Bishops are more active than their inferiors on this side of the Atlantic, we shall begin to hope that they may be useful on the other.

These reforms have begun at the wrong end. “God,” says old Hooker, no enemy to Episcopal Establishments, “first assigned Adam maintenance for life, and then appointed him a law to observe.” Our rulers would have done well to imitate the example,—to give some security to the hearth and to the back of the slave, before they sent him Bishops, Archdeacons, and Chancellors and Chapters.

The work of Mr. Stephen has, we think, disposed forever of some of the principal arguments which are urged by the Colonists. If those who conscientiously support slavery be open to conviction, if its dishonest advocates be susceptible of shame, they can surely never again resort to that mode of defence, which they have so often employed when hard pressed by some particular case of oppression. On such occasions their cry has been, “There are individual instances. You must not deduce general conclusions from them. What would you say, if we were to form our estimate of English society from the Police Reports, or the Newgate Calendar? Look at the rules, and not at the exceptions.” Here, then, we have those boasted rides. And what are they? We find that the actions which other societies punish as crimes, are in the West Indies sanctioned by law;—that practices, of which England affords no example but in the records of the jail and the gibbet, are there suffered to exist unpunished;—that atrocities may there be perpetrated in the drawing-room or in the market-place, on the persons of untried and unconvicted individuals, which here would scarcely find an asylum in the vaults of the Blood-Bowl House.

Is it any answer to this charge, now most fully established, to say that we too have our crimes? Unquestionably, under all systems, however wise, under all circumstances, however fortunate, the passions of men will incite them to evil. The most vigilant police, the most rigid tribunals, the severest penalties, are but imperfect restraints upon avarice and revenge. What then must be the ease when these restraints are withdrawn? In England there is a legal remedy for every injury. If the first prince of the blood, were to treat the poorest pauper in St. Giles’s as the best code in the West Indies authorizes a master to treat his slave, it would be better for him that he had never been born. Yet even here we find, that wherever power is given, it is occasionally abused; that magistrates, not having the fear of the Court of King’s Bench before their eyes, will sometimes be guilty of injustice and tyranny, that even parents will sometimes starve, torture, murder the helpless beings to whom they have given life. And is it not evident, that where there are fewer checks, there will be more cruelty?

But we are told, the manners of a people, the state of public opinion, are of more real consequence than any written code. Many things, it is confessed, in the Colonial laws, are cruel and unjust in theory: but we are assured that the feeling of the Colonists renders the practical operation of the system lenient and liberal. We answer, that publie feeling, though an excellent auxiliary to laws, always has been, and always must be, a miserable and inefficient substitute for them. The rules of evidence on which public opinion proceeds are defective, and its decisions are capricious. Its condemnation frequently spares the guilty, and falls on the innocent. It is terrible to sensitive and generous minds; but it is disregarded by those whose hardened depravity most requires restraint. Hence its decrees, however salutary, unless supported by the clearer definitions and stronger sanctions of legislation, will be daily and hourly infringed; and with principles which rest only on public opinion, frequent infraction amounts to a repeal. Nothing that is very common can be very disgraceful. Thus public opinion, when not strengthened by positive enactment, is first defied, and then vitiated. At best it is a feeble check to wickedness, and at last it becomes its most powerful auxiliary.

As a remedy for the evils of a system of slavery, public opinion must be utterly inefficacious; and that for this simple reason, that the opinion of the slaves themselves goes for nothing. The desire which we feel to obtain the approbation, and to avoid the censure of our neighbours, is no innate or universal sentiment. It always springs, directly or indirectly, from consideration of the power which others possess to serve or to injure us. The good will of the lower orders, is courted only in countries where they possess political privileges, and where there is much they can give, and much that they can take away. Their opinion is important or unimportant, in proportion as their legal rights are great or small. It can, therefore, never be a substitute for legal rights. Does a Smithfield drover care for the love or hatred of his oxen? and yet his oxen, since the passing of Mr. Martin’s meliorating act, are scarcely in a more unprotected condition than the slaves in our islands.

The opinion then, which is to guard the slaves from the oppressions of the privileged order, is the opinion of the privileged order itself. A vast authority is intrusted to the master—the law imposes scarcely tiny restraints upon him—and we are required to believe, that the place of all other checks will be fully supplied by the general sense of those who participate in his power and his temptations. This may be reason at Kingston; but will it pass at Westminster? We are not inveighing against the white inhabitants of the West Indies. We do not say that they are naturally more cruel or more sensual than ourselves. But we say that they are men; and they desire to be considered as angels!—we say as angels, for to no human being, however generous and beneficent, to no philanthropist, to no fathers of the church, could powers like theirs be safely intrusted. Such authority a parent ought not to have over his children. They ask very complacently, “Are we men of a different species from yourselves? We come among you;—we mingle with you in all your kinds of business and pleasure;—we buy and sell with you on Change in the morning;—we dance with your daughters in the evening. Are not our manners civil? Are not our dinners good? Are we not kind friends, fair dealers, generous benefactors? Are not our names in the subscription lists of all your charities? And can you believe that we are such monsters as the saints represent us to be? Can you imagine that, by merely crossing the Atlantic, we acquire a new nature?” We reply, You are not men of a different species from ourselves; and, therefore, we will not give you powers with which we would not dare to trust ourselves. We know that your passions are like ours. We know that your restraints are fewer; and, therefore, we know that your crimes must be greater. Are despotic sovereigns men of harder hearts by nature than their subjects? Are they born with a hereditary thirst for blood—with a natural incapacity for friendship? Surely not. Yet what is their general character? False—cruel—licentious—-ungrateful. Many of them have performed single acts of splendid generosity and heroism; a few may be named whose general administration has been salutary; but scarcely one has passed through life without committing at least some one atrocious act, from the guilt and infamy of which restricting laws would have saved him and his victims. If Henry VIII. had been a private man, he might have torn his wife’s ruff, and kicked her lap-dog. He was a King, and he cutoff her head—not that his passions were more brutal than those of many other men, but that they were less restrained. How many of the West Indian overseers can boast of the piety and magnanimity of Theodosius? Yet, in a single moment of anger, that amiable prince destroyed more innocent people than all the ruffians in Europe stab in fifty years. Thus it is with a master in the Colonies. We will suppose him to be a good natured man, but subject, like other men, to occasional fits of passion. He gives an order. It is slowly or negligently executed. In England he would grumble, perhaps swear a little. In the West Indies, the law empowers him to indict a severe flogging on the loiterer. Are we very uncharitable in supposing that he will sometimes exercise his privilege?

It by no means follows that a person who is humane in England will be humane to his Negroes in the West Indies. Nothing is so capricious and inconsistent as the compassion of men. The Romans were people of the same flesh and blood with ourselves—they loved their friends—they cried at tragedies—they gave money to beggars;—yet we know their fondness for gladiatorial shows. When, by order of Pompey, some elephants were tortured in the amphitheatre, the audience was so shocked at the yells and contortions by which the poor creatures expressed their agony, that they burst forth into execrations against their favourite general. The same people, in the same place, had probably often given the fatal twirl of the thumb which condemned some gallant barbarian to receive the sword. In our own time, many a man shoots partridges in such numbers that he is compelled to bury them, who would chastise his son for amusing himself with the equally interesting, and not more cruel diversion, of catching flies and tearing them to pieces. The drover goads oxen—the fishmonger crimps cod—the dragoon sabres a Frenchman—the Spanish Inquisition burns a Jew—the Irish gentleman torments a Catholic. These persons are not necessarily destitute of feeling. Each of them would shrink from any cruel employment, except that to which his situation has familiarized him.

There is only one way in which the West Indians will ever convince the people of England that their practice is merciful, and that is, by making their laws merciful. We cannot understand why men should so tenaciously fight for powers which they do not mean to exercise. If the oppressive privileges of the master be nominal and not real, let him cede them, and silence calumny at once and for ever. Let him cede them for his own honour. Let him cede them in compliance with the desire, the vain and superfluous desire, we will suppose, of the people of England. Is the repeal of laws which have become obsolete,—is the prohibition of crimes which are never committed, too great a return for a bounty of twelve hundred thousand pounds, for a protecting duty most injurious to the manufacturers of England and the cultivators of Hindustan, for an army which alone protects from inevitable ruin the lives and possessions of the Colonists?

The fact notoriously is, that West Indian manners give protection even to those extreme enormities against which the West Indian laws provide. We have already adverted to one of the most ordinary sophisms of our opponents. “Why,” they exclaim, “is our whole body to be censured for the depravity of a few? Every society has its miscreants. If we had our Hodge, you had your Thurtell. If we had our Huggins, you had your Wall. No candid reasoner will ground general charges on individual eases.” The refutation is simple. When a community does nothing to prevent guilt, it ought to bear the blame of it. Wickedness, when punished, is disgraceful only to the offender. Unpunished, it is disgraceful to the whole society. Our charge against the Colonists is not that crimes are perpetrated among them, but that they are tolerated. We will give a single instance. Since the West Indians are fond of referring to our Newgate Calendar, we will place, side by side, a leaf from that melancholy Register, and another from the West Indian Annals.