the promoters of this alteration never meant to carry it into effect.  It was intended, by making a show of these laws, to deceive the people of England, and thus to prevent them from following up the great question of the abolition.  Mr. Clappeson, one of the evidences examined by the House of Commons, was in Jamaica, when the Assembly passed their famous consolidated laws, and he told the House, that “he had often heard from people there, that it was passed because of the stir in England about the slave trade;” and he added, “that slaves continued to be as ill treated there since the passing of that act as before.”  Mr. Cook, another of the evidences examined, was long resident in the same island, and, “though he lived there also since the passing of the act, he knew of no legal protection, which slaves had against injuries from their masters.”  Mr. Dalrymple was examined to the same point for Grenada.  He was there in 1788, when the Act for that island was passed also, called “An Act for the better Protection and promoting the Increase and Population of Slaves.”  He told the House, that, “while he resided there, the proposal in the British Parliament for the abolition of the slave trade was a matter of general discussion, and that he believed, that this was a principal reason for passing it.  He was of opinion, however, that this Act would prove ineffectual, because, as Negro evidence was not to be admitted, those, who chose to abuse their slaves, might still do it with impunity; and people, who lived on terms of intimacy, would dislike the idea of becoming spies and informers against each other.”  We have the same account of the ameliorating Act of Dominica.  “This Act,” says Governor Prevost, “appears to have been considered from the day it was passed until this hour as a political measure to avert the interference of the mother country in the management of the slaves.”  We, are informed also on the same authority, that the clauses of this Act, which had given a promise of better days, “had been wholly neglected.”  In short, the Acts passed in our different Islands for the pretended purpose of bettering the condition of the slaves have been all of them most shamefully neglected; and they remain only a dead letter; or they are as much a nullity, as if they had never existed, at the present day.

And as our planters have done nothing yet effectively by law for ameliorating the condition of their slaves, so they have done nothing or worse than nothing in the case of their emancipation.  In the year 1815 Mr. Wilberforce gave notice in the House of Commons of his intention to introduce there a bill for the registration of slaves in the British colonies.  In the following year an insurrection broke out among some slaves in Barbadoes.  Now, though this insurrection originated, as there was then reason to believe, in local or peculiar circumstances, or in circumstances which had often produced insurrections before, the