1830.] The Slave Trade. 287 



250,000, and an additional sum of 100,000, besides about 109,000 

 from government, had, in 1807, become bankrupt in resources ; and we 

 pause to consider whether up to the date of their dissolution, they had 

 really accomplished even one of the " philanthropic" objects, which 

 was the ostensible end of their labours, or done any one thing beneficial 

 to Africa. True it is, that with a rapid diminution of their funds, every 

 succeeding year produced very plausible accounts of the " nourishing 

 state of the colony," the " great progress" made in " the establishment 

 of schools," and " propagation of the gospel in Africa ;" the " rapid im- 

 provement" in the condition of all classes in the colony, and the bene- 

 ficial effect of all this upon the neighbouring country. The testimony 

 of Governor Ludlam (whose letters, when unfavourable, seem to have 

 been systematically suppressed),* Mr. Grant, member of the council of 

 Sierra Leone, Dr. Thorpe, its chief justice, and various others, may be 

 adduced in proof that these reports were most shamefully deceptive ; 

 these persons, as well as others, give very different accounts of the 

 matter. 



Governor Ludlam, in his celebrated letter to Mr. Macauley, of the 

 14th April, expressly shews the inutility of the Company's schemes ; and 

 Mr. Grant, in a pamphlet published three years after the dissolution of 

 the Company, says, " Their agents in the colony and their servants of 

 every description, appear to have been almost uniformly selected from a 

 class of men whose want of education was not compensated by liberal 

 sentiments j and whose ignorance of the foundations of civil government 

 and morality, was ill supplied by an austere tincture of sectarian piety. 

 Instead, then, of courting the affections of the different chiefs by whom 

 they were surrounded, they managed to foment their suspicions, to 

 abuse their prejudices, to profit of their simplicity. It does not seem 

 to have occurred to them that their own ruin or expulsion might be the 

 ultimate penalty of this invidious and narrow policy. Uninstructed in 

 human nature, they conceived their first duty to be the religious con- 

 version of their neighbours ; and to deride and insult their speculative 

 notions, the surest means of effecting that conversion. It can, then, be 

 no matter of surprise, that they soon found themselves besieged with 

 the hatred and suspicions of the petty chiefs of their neighbourhood ; or 

 that they should not at this day (1810) have availed themselves of any 

 connection with the more powerful and enlightened potentates of the 

 interior, to explore the country or add to our general information by 

 discoveries in that quarter of Africa/'t And in regard to the progress 

 of industry in the colony itself, he states, " in the course of twenty 

 years passed under the Company's Government, and two more since the 

 transfer, the settlers at this hour depend on imported produce for the 

 whole of their subsistence. A small quantity of inferior coffee, and a 

 few common vegetable roots, constitute the whole sum of its agricul- 

 tural and manufactured produce. 



" Sierra Leone is behind (and in a proportion that is not justified by 

 the comparative lateness of its existence) every other establishment on the 

 whole coast of Africa" //{ 



These assertions are amply confirmed by Dr. Thorpe, who, even at a 



* Vide Thoughts on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, by the late Jos. Marryat, Esq., 

 M.P. 1816. 



f Recent Transactions in Sierra Leone, p. 52. 

 . $ Ibid. pp. 62, 63. 



