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when a white man dies, who happens to possess 

 twenty negroes, he will divide them among his 

 brown family, leaving (we may say) five to each of 

 his four children. These are too few to be em- 

 ployed in plantation work ; they are, therefore, or- 

 dered to maintain their owner by some means or 

 other, and which means are frequently not the most 

 honest, the most frequent being the travelling about 

 as higglers, and exchanging the trumpery contents 

 of their packs and boxes with plantation negroes for 

 stolen rum and sugar. I confess I cannot see why, 

 on such bequest being made, the law should not 

 order the negroes to be sold, and the produce of the 

 sale paid to the mulatto heirs, but absolutely prohi- 

 biting the mulattoes from becoming proprietors of 

 the negroes themselves. Every man of humanity 

 must wish that slavery, even in its best and most 

 mitigated form, had never found a legal sanction, 

 and must regret that its system is now so incorpo- 

 rated with the welfare of Great Britain as well as of 

 Jamaica, as to make its extirpation an absolute im- 

 possibility, without the certainty of producing worse 

 mischiefs than the one which we annihilate. But 

 certainly there can be no sort of occasion for 

 continuing in the colonies the existence of do- 

 mestic slavery, which neither contributes to the 

 security of the colonies themselves, nor to the 

 opulence of the mother-country, the revenue of 

 which derived from colonial duties would suffer no 

 defalcation whatever, even if neither whites nor 



