THE BAHAMA ISLANDS 445 



habitants had much confidence in their rights as Englishmen, and we have seen 

 that they carried their attempts at assertion of those rights to the extreme. 

 Born and reared in the atmosphere of the institution of slavery, and accus- 

 tomed to dealing with it as they pleased, they were averse to any interference 

 with it at all, and they could not have been expected to submit without protest 

 to such changes, in the order of. things, as the British Cabinet proposed to them. 

 They had inherited the prejudices which are almost universal, if not inevitable, 

 in a state of society in which the interests of one class are subordinated to the 

 interests of those above them. While they were willing to care for their 

 slaves reasonably, it was difficult for them to acknowledge that any authority 

 in the Empire had the right to continue, as the Ministry had been doing, in 

 insisting on a line of action so obnoxious to them. Hence they used such 

 adjectives as " unwarrantable " and " unprecedented " to brand the conduct 

 of the authorities in the home government, and were extrei^^ely reluctant to 

 act on their recommendations. The depreciation in the value of their slaves 

 was used as an argument to prove the baneful effects of the agitation that had 

 been carried on in England, the reflection from which had reached the colonies. 

 The agitation did have some effect in this way, but the great cause of this 

 depreciation was doubtless economic. The prices of slaves had gone down 

 because of the worn-out condition of the land& of the Bahama Islands. There 

 was no longer the same amount' of employment for them that there had been 

 at the beginning of the century. 



Adoption of a New Slave Code. 

 In 1824 a statute was passed granting part of the reforms upon which the 

 home government bad insisted. It placed in the slave code some of the things 

 which were claimed as the custom of the Colony." At the following session of _ 

 the legislature the House declined to make any further alterations in its 

 slave code.'' The matter was not allowed to rest, however, for the Ministry 

 urged more strongly than ever the propriety of taking further action for 

 amelioration."'' In 1836 almost all of the recommendations of the home gov- 



"4 Geo. IV, 6. 



'^H. v., 1824, p. 95. 



" Loc. cit., 1826, pp. 18-28. The Secretary of State sent out a detailed state- 

 ment of the whole plan of the desired enactment, the provisions of which he had 

 grouped under eight heads. His persistency won with the House in so far that at 

 once on the meeting of the legislature in Octoher, 1826, a committee was appointed 

 which brought in eight hills embodying what is was thought could be conceded under 

 the eight respective headings proposed by the Secretary of State. .They were not 

 passed in this form however. 



