1st, "I do fear that, in the north of England, an undue stimulus has been given to manufacturing industry by the accommodation system pursued by the joint-stock banks. I think the connexion of the manufacturer with the joint-stock banks gave an undue and an improper impulse to trade in that quarter of the county; and I think that, in consequence of this, there have been more manufactures produced within the last two years than were necessary to supply the demand for them."
2ndly, "Look to the state of some of the foreign countries, which took, at one time, the greatest quantity of our manufactures;" South America, its ports strictly blockaded by France; the United States of North America, "in a state of nascent hostility," and also labouring under "a distress similar to our own, and arising from similar causes. The facility of accommodation afforded by certain banks there gave an undue stimulus to industry; this produced extravagant speculations; many persons failed in consequence, and trade necessarily then came to a stand-still." Canada—the peninsula, France, the great Kingdoms of the middle and north of Europe—Syria, Egypt, China, had been, and were, in such a state, as occasioned all interruption of our trade thither; "a stoppage in the demand for manufactured goods, and a correspondent depression in commerce." "When you put all these things together, all causes, mind you, affecting the market for your goods, and then combine them with the two or three defective harvests we have had of late, I ask you to answer me the question, Whether or not they have been sufficient to account for the depression of manufacturing industry."
Then came Sir Robert Peel to the two grand and suddenly discovered panaceas of the late Government, for recruiting the exhausted revenue, and relieving the general distress—viz. "cheap sugar," and "cheap bread."
1st, As to foreign sugar:—
"I clearly and freely admit that those restrictions which cannot be justified should be removed, and that the commerce of the country should be perfectly free, whenever it can possibly be so; but I consider the article of sugar to be wholly exempt from the principle of free trade." * * * "The question now is this—whether, after the sacrifices which this country has made for the suppression of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery, and the glorious results that have ensued, and are likely to ensue, from these sacrifices—whether we shall run the risk of losing the benefit of those sacrifices, and tarnishing for ever that glory, by admitting to the British market sugar the produce of foreign slavery." * * * "If you admit it, it will come from Brazil and Cuba. In Brazil, the slave-trade exists in full force; in Cuba, it is unmitigated in its extent and horrors. The sugar of Cuba is the finest in the world; but in Cuba, slavery is unparalleled in its horrors. I do not at all overstate the fact, when I say, that 50,000 slaves are annually landed in Cuba. That is the yearly importation into the island; but, when you take into consideration the vast numbers that perish before they leave their own coasts, the still greater number that die amidst the horrors of the middle passage, and the number that are lost at sea, you will come to the inevitable conclusion, that the number landed in Cuba—50,000 annually—is but a slight indication of the number shipped in Africa, or of the miseries and destruction that have taken place among them during their transport thither. If you open the markets of England to the sugar of Cuba, you may depend on it that you give a great stimulus to slavery, and the slave-trade." Sir Robert Peel then pointed out peculiar and decisive distinctions between the case of sugar, and that of cotton, tobacco, and coffee; that, though all of them were the produce of slave labour—First, we cannot now reject the cotton of the United States, without endangering to the last degree the manufacturing prosperity of the kingdom. Secondly, of all the descriptions of slave produce, sugar is the most cruelly destructive of human life—the proportion of deaths in a sugar plantation being infinitely greater than on those of cotton or coffee. Thirdly, slave grown sugar has never been admitted to consumption in this country.[13] He also assigned two great co-operating reasons for rejecting slave-grown sugar:—"That the people of England required the great experiment of emancipation to be fairly tried; and they would not think it fairly tried, if, at this moment, when the colonies were struggling with such difficulties, we were to open the floodgates of a foreign supply, and inundate the British market with sugar, the produce of slave-labour;" adopting the very words of the Whig Vice-President of the Board of Trade, Mr Labouchere, on the 25th June 1840. The other reason was, "that our immense possessions in the East Indies give us the means, and afford us every facility, for acquiring sugar, the produce of free labour, to an illimitable extent."
[ [13] ] The following striking passage from the writings of the celebrated Dr Channing of America, was quoted by Sir Robert Peel in the speech under consideration. "Great Britain, loaded with an unprecedented debt, and with a grinding taxation, contracted a new debt of a hundred millions of dollars, to give freedom, not to Englishmen, but to the degraded African. I know not that history records an act so disinterested, so sublime. In the progress of ages, England's naval triumphs will shrink into a more and more narrow space in the records of our race—this moral triumph will fill a broader—brighter page." "Take care!" emphatically added Sir Robert Peel, "that this brighter page be not sullied by the admission of slave sugar into the consumption of this country—by our encouragement—and, too, our unnecessary encouragement of slavery and the slave-trade!"—Noble sentiments!
So much for foreign sugar. Now for—
II. FOREIGN CORN; and we beg the special attention of all parties to this portion of the manifesto of Sir Robert Peel:—