XV
COMMERCIAL RELATIONS IN SCOTLAND
Commercial Relations
I have only to add, as a finality of my doings and mission in Great Britain, that in Scotland I fully succeeded in establishing commercial relations for traffic in all kinds of native African produce, especially cotton, which businesses are to be done directly and immediately between us and them, without the intervention or agencies of any society or association whatever. The only agencies in the case are to be the producers, sellers, and buyers—the Scottish house dealing with us as men, and not children. These arrangements are made to facilitate, and give us the assurance of the best encouragement to prosecute vigorously commercial enterprises—especially, as before stated, the cotton culture—the great source of wealth to any people and all civilized nations.
Business Integrity
The British people have the fullest confidence in our integrity to carry out these enterprises successfully, and now only await our advent there, and commencement to do anything necessary we may desire, or that the circumstances justify. Each individual is regarded as a man in these new relations, and, as such, expected to make his own contracts according to business custom, discharging in like manner his individual obligations. It must here be expressly understood that there are to be nothing but business relations between us, their entire confidence and dependence being in the self-reliant, independent transactions of black men themselves. We are expected, and will be looked for, to create our own ways and means among ourselves as other men do.
Public Endorsement
As an earnest of the estimate set upon our adventure, I subjoin the names of a number of the leading commercial British journals—the two first being English, and all the others Scottish, in the midst of manufacturing districts, and all speaking favorably of the project:
The Leeds Mercury, the Newcastle Daily Chronicle, the Glasgow Herald, the Glasgow Examiner, the Scottish Guardian, the North British Daily Mail, the Glasgow Morning Journal, the Mercantile Advertiser, and others. (For absence of these notices, see author's prefatory note.)