We think it not difficult to show that England is the best friend of slavery, while professing an aversion to it, and dictating to other governments to strive for its abolition. At an enormous expense, she maintains men-of-war upon the coast of Africa, with the object of suppressing the trade in negro slaves. This expense her white slaves are taxed to pay; while the men-of-war have not only not suppressed the slave-trade, but have doubled its horrors, by compelling the slave-traders to inflict new tortures upon the negroes they capture and conceal. In the mean time, the government is doing all in its power to impoverish and enslave (for the slavery of a people follows its poverty) the more intelligent races of the world. England prides herself upon her efforts to destroy the trade in African savages and chattel slavery. Her philanthropy is all black; miserable wretches with pale faces have no claims upon her assisting hand; and she refuses to recognise the only kind of slavery by which masters are necessitated to provide well for their slaves, while she enforces that system which starves them! England is the best friend of the most destructive species of slavery, and has extended it over tens of millions of human beings.
Justice, humanity, and the age demand the abolition of this exhausting, famine-breeding, and murderous system. It is hostile to every principle of right—to civilization, and to the loving spirit of Christianity. Starving millions groan beneath the yoke. From the crowded factories and workshops—from the pestilential hovels—from the dark and slave-filled coal-pits—from the populous workhouses—from the vast army of wandering beggars in England and Scotland—from the perishing peasantry of Ireland—from the wretched Hindoos upon the Ganges and the Indus—from the betrayed Coolies in the West-India Islands—arises the cry for relief from the plunderers and the oppressors. "How long, O Lord, how long!"
A few thousand persons own the United Kingdom. They have robbed and reduced to slavery not only their own countrymen, but millions in other lands. They continue to rob wherever they find an opportunity. They spend what their crime has accumulated in all kinds of vice and dissipation, and rear their children to the same courses. Money raised for religious purposes they waste in luxurious living. They trade in all the offices of church and state. They persecute, by exclusion, all who do not subscribe to "thirty-nine articles" which they wish to force upon mankind. In brief, the oligarchy lies like an incubus upon the empire, and the people cannot call themselves either free or happy until the aristocrats be driven from their high places. Burst, then, the chains, ye countrymen of Hampden and Vane! Show to the world that the old fire is not yet quenched! that the spirits of your martyrs to liberty are yet among you, and their lessons in your hearts! Obtain your freedom—peaceably, if you can—but obtain it, for it expands and ennobles the life of a nation! In the air of liberty alone can a people enjoy a healthy existence. A day of real freedom is worth more than years in a dungeon. What have you to dread? Do you not know your strength? Be assured, this aristocracy could not stand an hour, were you resolved against its existence! It would be swept away as a feather before a hurricane. Do you fear that much blood would flow in the struggle? Consider the hundreds of thousands who are crushed out of existence every year by this aristocracy, and ask yourselves if it is not better that the system should be over-thrown, even at the expense of blood, than that it should continue its destructive career? Had not men better make an effort to secure freedom and plenty for their posterity, than starve quietly by the wayside? These are the questions you should take home to your hearts. One grand, determined, glorious effort, and you are free.
"Hereditary bondsmen, know ye not
Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?"
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The butties are the men who superintend the conveyance of the coal from the digger to the pit-shaft.
[2] To hurry is to draw or push the coal-cars.
[3] Mitchell, Evidence, No. 7; App. pt. i. p. 65, 1. 31.