In effecting emancipation rests with the master and not with the slave. ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the slave would do his duty, if the master could be made to do his. If any apprenticeship were required, it is the planter should be made to serve it; and if any legitimate motive could be urged for gradual, rather than immediate, emancipation, it would arise from the side of the master, and not the slave, in order to instil into a heart, which the system has depraved, the principles of justice, and mercy, and truth. It is, indeed, a very hard lesson for him to learn, when he is required to treat those as men and women, endowed with liberties and privileges equal to himself, whom he has from childhood regarded merely as beasts of burden, a kind of intelligent animal, made to serve the interests and obey the will of others. Our experience will also serve as an example to the friends of the oppressed in other countries, to show them how utterly futile is the attempt to legislate by foreign authority for the proper treatment of the slave, while arbitrary power is vested in the master; or so to leave the victim in his hands as to prevent his escape from ill-treatment, or to seek his own market for his industry. If this had been secured to the apprentices in our colonies, the entire apparatus of stipendiary magistrates might have been dispensed with. As the case now stands, so much is still left for the philanthropists of our country to accomplish on the behalf of our own slave population, that the whole moral force of the religious public must be again brought to bear upon the subject. Already have a great number of the old anti-slavery societies been re-organized; public meetings are being held in various parts of the country; strong demonstrations are made to those who solicit our votes as members of parliament; pamphlets and addresses are in free circulation; and we cannot but entertain the fullest conviction that, however the confidence of the British Parliament has been abused by the abettors of tyranny abroad, that ultimately the strength of the British arm will be felt, slavery will be abandoned in practice as it is now abolished in law; and that the example which Britain has set, will, in due time, be followed by other nations, till a system so accursed in its nature and its effects shall be altogether banished from the abodes of men. CONTENTS. Address of the Baptist Missionaries in Jamaica, to the Marquis of Sligo Address of the Bristol Association of Baptist Churches Address of the Glasgow Emancipation Society - Address to the Reader on the condition of the Apprentices in our Co- lonies - Antigua, State of Society in the Island of, the effect of complete Emanci- Baptist Union, Letter of the Committee of, to the Board of the Triennial Bombay Presidency, Slavery under the Bradford Remonstrance Bristol Association of Baptist Churches, Address of the British Deputation, The - - Burning of the Rev. J. Howard Hinton's History of America 227 90 286 258 48 182 Condition of the Apprentices in our Colonies, Address to the Reader on the 289 - 215 County Associations, Notice to the Secretary of the 265 Day of Especial Prayer for the Abolition of American Slavery, Observation Kentucky, Address of the Synod of Legal Position of Apprenticed Labourers in Jamaica Letter from Dr. S. H. Cox, on Holding Christian Communion with Slave- - 188, 271 86 95 Progress of Abolition in the United States, Brief Notices of the 3, 25, 58, 76 Resolutions of several Associated Bodies on the Subject of American Riotous Interruption of a Bible Society Meeting Scene on the Ohio, A 227 Slave Population in South Carolina and Georgia, Religious state of the Slaves in India, Female Slave Story, The Slave-driving, Mississippi - Slave-holding Ministers a Scandal to their Profession Slave-holding Christians, A Bye-stander's estimate of – Slavery, Testimony of British Christians against State of Society in Antigua, the effect of complete Emancipation 187 203 201 72, 94 126 259 256 184 182 143 253 168 197 249 267 293 303 91 10 69 |