Report of Society's Meetings. 113 
lay in its power to encourage and promote the agricul- 
tural and commercial welfare of the Colony. When I 
had the honour of addressing you at the beginning of this 
year, I said there was every reason to hope that we were 
on the eve of seeing justice done to Britain's sugar pro- 
ducing colonies. That eve has deepened on towards 
night, and yet justice has not been done, but we are still 
buoyed up by the hope that justice and fairplay must 
ere long prevail, and that before our case is utterly 
hopeless, our Colony ruined, and our occupation gone, 
the Mother Country will have answered in a spirit of 
honesty and justice the burden and prayer of many a 
petition^ addressed to her by her children living in the 
outposts of the Empire. Much has been done during the 
year to bring the position of Britain's sugar colonies 
to the notice of the British public, new champions 
have arisen and new adherents been added to the 
ranks of those who have unfalteringly demanded fair- 
play and honest treatment as the right of every British 
subje6l. The West India Committee and the Anti- 
bounty League have been unceasing in their efforts to 
spread a true knowledge of the gross injustice done to 
these Colonies, and a wide-spread and steadily increasing 
interest in the subje6l has been created. I believe that 
eminent statesman, the Right Honourable the Secretary 
of State for the Colonies, fully recognises the frightful 
injustice done to us, and has an earnest desire to right 
our wrongs, and I sincerely hope his voice will yet pre- 
vail in the councils of the Cabinet. His speeches have 
shewn how clearly he realises the situation, and he 
accepted as expressing his views the words of an im- 
perially-minded poet, who represented England as thus 
addressing her sons in many distant Colonies : — 
" Also, we will make promise, so long as the blood endures 
I will know that your good is mine : you shall feel that my strength 
is yours : 
In the day of Armageddon, at the last great fight of all 
That our house stand together and the pillars do not fall." 
If the sentiment expressed in these lines was adhered 
to, no foreign and hostile power would be allowed to 
wage a dishonest commercial warfare, aimed at the 
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