But this plan of regulation was not only inefficacious, but unsafe.  He entered his protest against the fatal consequences which might result from it.  The Negroes were creatures like ourselves; but they were uninformed, and their moral character was debased.  Hence they were unfit for civil rights.  To use these properly they must be gradually restored to that level, from which they had been so unjustly degraded.  To allow them an appeal to the laws, would be to awaken in them a sense of the dignity of their nature.  The first return of life, after a swoon, was commonly a convulsion, dangerous at once to the party himself and to all around him.  You should first prepare them for the situation, and not bring the situation to them.  To be under the protection of the law was in fact to be a freeman; and to unite slavery and freedom in one condition was impracticable.  The abolition, on the other hand, was exactly such an agent as the case required.  All hopes of supplies from the coast being cut off, breeding would henceforth become a serious object of attention; and the care of this, as including better clothing, and feeding, and milder discipline, would extend to innumerable particulars, which an act of assembly could neither specify nor enforce.  The horrible system, too, which many had gone upon, of working out their slaves in a few years, and recruiting their gangs with imported Africans, would receive its death-blow from the abolition of the trade.  The opposite would force itself on the most unfeeling heart.  Ruin would stare a man in the face, if he were not to conform to it.  The non-resident owners would then express themselves in the terms of Sir Philip Gibbs, “that he should consider it as the fault of his manager, if he were not to keep up the number of his slaves.”  This reasoning concerning the different tendencies of the two systems was self-evident; but facts were not wanting to confirm it.  Mr. Long had remarked, that all the insurrections and suicides in Jamaica had been found among the imported slaves, who, not having lost the consciousness of civil rights, which they had enjoyed in their own country, could not brook the indignities to which they were subjected in the West Indies.  An instance in point was afforded also by what had lately taken place in the island of Dominica.  The disturbance there had been chiefly occasioned by some runaway slaves from the French islands.  But what an illustration was it of his own doctrine to say, that the slaves of several persons, who had been treated with kindness, were not among the number of the insurgents on that occasion!