the slave trade was abolished by England, and it is therefore to be presumed, that no new slaves have been imported into the British colonies within that period.  The slaves, therefore, who are there at this day, must consist either of Africans, whose spirits must have been long ago broken, or of Creoles born in the cradle and brought up in the trammels of slavery.  What argument then can be produced for the continuation of a barbarous discipline there?  And we are very glad to find that two gentlemen, both of whom we have had occasion to quote before, bear us out in this remark.  Mr. Steele, speaking of some of the old cruel laws of Barbadoes, applies them to the case before us in these words:—­“As, according to Ligon’s account, there were not above two-thirds of the island in plantations in the year 1650, we must suppose that in the year 1688 the great number of African-born slaves brought into the plantations in chains, and compelled to labour by the terrors of corporal punishment, might have made it appear necessary to enact a temporary law so harsh as the statute No. 82; but when the great majority of the Negroes were become vernacular, born in the island, naturalized by language, and familiarised by custom, did not policy as well as humanity require:  them to be put under milder conditions, such as were granted to the slaves of our Saxon ancestors?” Colonel Malenfant speaks the same sentiments.  In defending his plan, which he offered to the French Government for St. Domingo in 1814, against the vulgar prejudice, that “where you employ Negroes you must of necessity use slavery,” he delivers himself thus:—­“[18]If all the Negroes on a plantation had not been more than six months out of Africa, or if they had the same ideas concerning an independent manner of life as the Indians or the savages of Guiana, I should consider my plan to be impracticable.  I should then say that coercion would be necessary:  but ninety-nine out of every hundred Negroes in St. Domingo are aware that they cannot obtain necessaries without work.  They know that it is their duty to work, and they are even desirous of working; but the remembrance of their cruel sufferings in the time of slavery renders them suspicious.”  We may conclude, then, that if a cruel discipline was not necessary in the years 1790 and 1794, to which these gentlemen allude, when there must have been some thousands of newly imported Africans both in St. Domingo and in the English colonies, it cannot be necessary now, when there have been no importations into the latter for fifteen years.  There can be no excuse, then, for the English planters for not altering their system, and this immediately.  It is, on the other hand, a great reproach to them, considering the quality and character of their slaves, that they should not of themselves have come forward on the subject before this time.