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a letter dated 18th May 1827, to authorise such remission. unfortunate Henry and Helen Moss," he tells his Lordship, rather to be pitied for the untoward melancholy occurrence which has taken place;" he therefore hastens to prevent the impression the bare mention of the case might make on his Lordship's mind. In a letter of a later date (3d July 1827,) he recurs with much solicitude to the subject. Some extracts from that letter have already appeared in the admirable despatch of Mr. Huskisson, who held the colonial seals when it arrived. It expresses a strong sense of the respectability of Mr. and Mrs. Moss, and of their general kindness to their slaves, and refers to the high estimation in which they are held by "all who have visited Mr. Moss and partaken of his hospitality."* Nay; "Mr. Moss, and especially Mrs. Moss, have never been otherwise than favourably spoken of in every respect, including that of his slave management." The Governor, in short, is most anxious that "persons of their respectability might be spared from imprisonment;" and at least, that Lord Bathurst will allow him to "relinquish the mulct" lest they should be “held cruel and oppressive beyond others," and also in order, in some degree, "to remove the impression of their being deemed habitually and notoriously cruel." But he adds, and the addition is most significative of colonial feeling on such subjects; "Notwithstanding their being in gaol, they are visited by the most respectable persons in the place, and by ALL who knew them before. This would not be the case even here, if it was the public opinion that the treatment of Mr. Moss's slaves in general was unduly severe !"

From this inference of the governor we entirely dissent. Indeed his own tone was much altered after receiving the despatch of Mr. Secretary Huskisson. "I confess myself," he says, "much instructed by the despatch of Mr. Huskisson, as to the manner of viewing both faults and offences!" And he then claims to himself some merit for the sincere interest he takes in the subject.-All we ourselves have previously known of this gentleman's conduct, in the great question now agitating with respect to colonial slavery, is from the papers laid before parliament by his Majesty's command, in the year 1825, a brief abstract of which is given in a pamphlet published by the Anti-Slavery Society in 1826, entitled "The Slave Colonies of Great Britain," &c. pp. 1-11. He had transmitted to Lord Bathurst an act of the Colonial Assembly, of which his Lordship censures the injustice in no measured terms, and which Mr. Huskisson, even after it had been greatly modified, also condemns with pointed severity. Of this act, he says, that "it improves the condition of the slaves very considerably." And yet, if we look at the act, we shall find it, what we have elsewhere described it to be, (No. 28, p. 87,)" mere unmeaning verbiage; apparent concessions which are drawn back by the multiplicity and largeness of the exceptions, and

Here we have the true source of many a high eulogium on colonial planters and their humanity, from naval and military officers, and from casual visitants, the lovers of good cheer, who, like Mr. Coleridge, (the Six Months tourist in the West Indies), find a compensation, in the turtle and madeira of the hospitable slaveholder's table, for all the oppressions and atrocities which may, at the very time, be passing in the slave yard or the field.

pretended reforms which leave every evil of slavery untouched,”-“au idle and useless parade of legislation, calculated for no purpose but to blind the eyes of the people of this country."

Since this transaction took place General Grant, we regret to learn, has been promoted from the petty government of the Bahamas, to the far more important situation of governor of Trinidad, where he will have to carry into execution his Majesty's plans of West Indian reform;-the grand experiment of amelioration which Mr. Canning held out as the model after which the whole frame of our colonial policy was to be moulded. This is an appointment which, judging from our only means of knowledge, seems highly inauspicious both for the slaves, the subjects of the experiment, and for those also who have undertaken their cause, and who will be made answerable, at least by their opponents and detractors, for its failure.

To conclude, if we would duly estimate the state of feeling, in a community corrupted by slavery, and the evil that must follow from leaving it to such communities to legislate for their unhappy dependents, we should contrast the burst of execration which, a few days ago, in this capital, added bitterer agonies to the stroke of justice which fell upon the wretched Esther Hibner; with the general sympathy excited, among the colonists of the Bahamas, with the more lenient fate of Henry and Helen Moss, two not less guilty criminals.

If, also, we would duly estimate the unexampled wretchedness which the Anti-Slavery Society has united to extirpate, we must view, in connection with this transaction, at one extremity of the Antilles, the no less revolting scenes passing at Berbice, their other extremity (See Reporter, Nos. 5, 16, 43 and 46); and while we may imagine what may have occurred, contemporaneously, in the intervening colonies from which no similar returns have been supplied, we must combine with them the picture of slavery in the Mauritius which has so recently harrowed the hearts of our readers (No. 44). We shall then have before us a mass of suffering which may well make us to shudder, when we reflect that it has been inflicted, and is still proceeding, under British authority; and that therefore we, this nation,-stand answerable for it all, before Him who claims the prerogative of being the avenger of the oppressed. Before Him and before the public do we again solemnly pledge ourselves, without fear or favour for any individuals, whether high or low, who participate in this CRIME, to exert ourselves to the utmost, in vindicating the indefeasible claims of these unfriended and outcast children of humanity to the rights of British subjects; to equal laws; to justice; to freedom; and to all the blessings of the gospel.

A notice of one or two remaining points in the letter of Philalethes; and our reply to the British Critic, will appear either in a supplement, or

in the next number.

Bagster and Thoms, Printers, 14, Bartholomew Close

MONTHLY REPORTER.

No. 48.]

FOR MAY, 1829.

[No. 24. Vol. ii.

The "ANTI-SLAVERY MONTHLY Reporter" will be ready for delivery on the first day of every month. Copies will be forwarded at the request of any AntiSlavery Society, at the rate of four shillings per hundred, when not exceeding half a sheet, and in proportion, when it exceeds that quantity. All persons wishing to receive a regular supply are requested to make application to the Secretary, at the Society's office, No. 18, Aldermanbury, and mention the conveyance by which they may be most conveniently sent. Single Copies may be had of all booksellers and newsmen, at the rate of 1d. per half-sheet of eight pages, or 2d. per sheet of sixteen pages.

THE BRITISH CRITIC'S SECOND ATTACK ON THE ANTI-SLAVERY REPORTER, IN VINDICATION OF THE CONVERSION AND PROPAGATION SOCIETIES, CONSIDERED AND REpelled.

OUR antagonist in the British Critic (pp. 407, 408), supposes that we are anxious to know who it is that has assailed us so very vigorously. We really feel no anxiety on the subject. Whether he be a vice-president of the Conversion Society, or its secretary; whether he be layman or clergyman, and if the latter, whether bishop, priest, or deacon ;-we can have no wish to be acquainted with one who, but for the sake of the cause involved in his attack, would not have been entitled to much notice on the ground either of his fair dealing, or of his observance of the ordinary courtesies or even decencies of literary combat. We leave to their fate his loud vapourings, his unsupported assertions, and his virulent abuse. The last of these, indeed, cannot but produce an impression in our favour, according to the well known position, that it is when men find themselves at a loss for argument that they begin to call names. We shall therefore confine ourselves to such allegations of our opponent as are tangible and specific.

Amid his numerous vague and general charges of mendacity, in the last number of his work, he has specified only two examples. The futility of one of them has been already demonstrated (No. 47, p. 451.) The other is a still more remarkable instance of the strange inaccuracies into which a writer may be betrayed, who permits his controversial eagerness to get the better of his prudence, not to say his principle.* In the Reporter, No. 41, p. 32, we had characterised some of the

At p. 407, the British Critic says, "In one instance, and in one only, the Reporter has the candour to admit that we have detected him in a falsehood" and he quotes in proof of this assertion, p. 405 of the Reporter, where we have certainly made no such admission as he has untruly attributed to us. It is due, however, to our Critic to state, that whether from some intellectual or moral infirmity, he understands the word falsehood to signify the utterance of an incorrect statement, without reference to the intention of the utterer. He otherwise would never have said that we have had the candour to admit he had detected us in a falsehood, when our admission was that we had unintentionally fallen into a blunder. We may state, in words which have often been quoted, as our reason for regarding "without the least mixture of anger or resentment,"

statements of the Conversion Society as vague, (an imputation which our Critic repels with as much indignation as if it were the crimen falsi)— and as an instance of this vagueness, we referred to its Report for 1827, (p. 9), where, while speaking, in the text, of certain local institutions having in view objects similar to its own, namely, the instruction of the slaves, it gave in a note five examples of the kind of institution spoken of in the text, all of which, we asserted, were exclusively intended for the free. We grounded this assertion on the descriptive titles of these five Associations (Reporter, p. 399, and British Critic, p. 408); and if there be any precise meaning in words, we were right in doing so; we were right, that is to say, in assuming that the words "coloured poor' meant "coloured poor," and not any other class to whom that designation had never been applied before. The terms, we need not say, are applied universally, in the West Indies, to free persons alone, to the exclusion of slaves; and the Society's Report has nowhere informed us that it had begun to use them in any new sense. We therefore took it for granted that the words continued to mean what they had always meant. No, says the British Critic, the Anti-Slavery Reporter is guilty of falsehood and calumny for having so understood them; and his reasons are (see British Critic, pp. 409 and 410,) first, because, as he says, one of these five local Associations had, in 1828, (in what month he does not say) published at Barbadoes its second annual report, by which it appears that a certain number of slave boys and girls attended its school;-and second, because he, the British Critic, chooses to affirm, on his own unsupported authority, that slaves are also taught by three more of these five Associations. Now, admitting all this to be true, (which is a large admission, as we have only this anonymous writer's authority for it) it seems to us not only not to refute, but to establish our charge of vagueness, the Critic himself being the witness, and thus in fact, stultifying by his very statement all his own harsh imputations. Such a close of his wordy warfare is not a little ludicrous. It seems an utter waste of time to bestow it on such trivialities. We now therefore proceed to other matters.

though with an involuntary feeling of contempt, "the use of a style which decency and politeness have banished from the more liberal part of mankind," that 66 every animal employs the note, or cry, or howl which is peculiar to his species; every man expresses himself in the dialect the most congenial to his temper and inclination, the most familiar to the company in which he has lived, and to the authors with whom he is conversant."

Although our acknowledgement of a mistake into which we had fallen, (see Reporter, p. 403), has been so ungraciously received by our Critic, (British Critic, p. 407), we shall not be deterred by that circumstance from correcting another error which he has not detected, but which we have discovered in looking over what has been written. We stated (No. 41, p. 322), that in the church of St. Dorothy's, there was a single weekly service, after which the Rector was ready to catechise such slaves as offered themselves; whereas the words of the Report (p. 16), are, that "morning and evening service are read every Sunday," and that "the intervening time is occupied in catechising such as offer themselves." We added, however, which is the case, that it is not said that any do offer themselves for that purpose, although we admit that the words might be supposed to imply that some do come.

We are ashamed to prolong for one moment this petty controversy, but we must advert to one other instance of our Critic's rash accusations. He charged

In order to confound the Anti-Slavery Reporter, and to shew that a "decided progress is making in Christian knowledge throughout the West Indies," the British Critic brings forward various extracts from the reports of the Society for promoting Christian Knowledge, and from the report also of a local Society in St. Thomas in the East. These reports, however, only give us under another title the testimony of the same, or nearly the same parties who furnished the Conversion Society with its information; the members of these different Societies being nearly identical. The testimony, though thus repeated, evidently gains little or no accession of strength by such repetition. These fresh extracts give us substantially the same flattering accounts of the progress of Christianity, and from the same sources, with the Conversion Society, and they also observe the same absolute silence as to the want of a sabbath for the bulk of the slaves, on which we have had occasion so frequently to animadvert.* These accounts too, however flattering, are in direct contradiction to the testimony of the Conversion Society's own chosen witnesses, the Rev. Mr. Barker, and the very Rev. Archdeacon Parry. The former of these gentlemen states, that "until we amend this evil," namely, the general perversion of Sunday to secular employments, "all attempts to promote Christian knowledge will be rain and fruitless ;" and even if we somewhat qualify the universality of his assertion, surely enough will remain to justify a strong doubt respecting the strict accuracy of the favourable accounts which are here cited. The Archdeacon also tells us, that to the slave, as far as religious instruction is concerned, "Sunday is every thing."-And yet we are to believe that, without it, Christianity is making great progress in some islands where the bulk of the slaves have no Sunday at all. The statement is incredible. And what is gained by these extracts? The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge praises the Conversion Society, and this in its turn praises the other, while each uses the authority of the other to vindicate its own statements, these statements being derived also, in general, by both, from nearly the same identical sources of information, namely, the bishops and clergy of the West Indies.

In its Report for 1828, the Society for promoting Christian Knowledge asserts (p. 41, 42) that the plan of his Majesty's government for diffusing Christianity in the West Indies, by establishing a hierarchy there, must be admitted, even by those who were hostile to the measure, to have "fully succeeded," (taking an opportunity at the same time of de

us (see British Critic, p. 222, and Reporter, p. 404), with a wilful misrepresentation, because we did not assume that reading was taught in all schools said to proceed on the National plan. "The reader," he observes in his usual style, "will hardly believe it." "National, therefore of course, reading schools." On turning however to p. 13 of this very report of the Society for 1827, we find it stated that in the St. Catherine's schools, Jamaica, "the instruction is altogether oral;" and yet of these schools we are told in the same breath, that "the system pursued in the central school, Baldwin's Gardens, is as closely adhered to as circumstances will permit." Still this candid writer deems it false and malignant in us not to understand that schools on the National plan are of course, (necessarily) reading schools!

In this culpable, though in them less inexcusable silence, the Methodist, Moravian and Dissenting Societies are equally involved with those of the Church of England.