chap, iv.] WEST INDIES. 323 
out an augmentation by purchase, seventeen must 
do the work first allotted to twenty. This must 
give rise to discontent, desertion, and revolt; or, if 
the negroes put up patiently with this surcharge of 
labour, illness and an earlier death must be the con¬ 
sequence. Or lastly, if the planters seek to avoid 
all these inconveniencies, they must gradually con¬ 
tract the limits of their plantations, and of course 
diminish their produce.”—Thus immediate inte¬ 
rest in all cases, and urgent distress in many, are 
opposed to the principles of justice and the dic¬ 
tates of humanity ?* 
What I have thus deliberately written, is not, if 
I know my own heart, the language of selfishness 
or party. I confess that, reflecting on the means 
•by which slaves are very frequently obtained in 
Africa, and the destruction that formerly attended 
the mode of transporting them to the West Indies, 
I was at on'e time of opinion, it became this great 
and renowned nation, instead of regulating her con¬ 
duct by that of other states, to set a laudable exam- 
* The present annual decrease of the negroes in the British West In 
dies is estimated at two and a halt per centum on the whole number; 
but if the same quantity of labour which they now perform, shali 
continue to be exacted from them as their numbers diminish, it cannot 
be doubted, that the loss will be greater every year, and augment with 
accelerated rapidity. The sugar estates will, undoubtedly, suflei 
most, and it is no difficult matter to calculate in what time they will 
be entirely dismantled. In Jamaica the number employed in that line 
of culture in 1789 was 128,728, all of whom,. without fresh supplies 
from Africa, would probably be extinct in less than thirty year'. t 
