him.  Almost every planter he had named had found his negroes increase under the good treatment he had professed to give them; and it was an axiom, throughout the whole evidence, that, wherever they were well used, importations were not necessary.  It had been said, indeed, by some adverse witnesses, that in Jamaica all possible means had been used to keep up the stock by breeding; but how preposterous was this, when it was allowed that the morals of the slaves had been totally neglected, and that the planters preferred buying a larger proportion of males than females!

The misfortune was, that prejudice, and not reason, was the enemy to be subdued.  The prejudices of the West Indians on these points were numerous and inveterate.  Mr. Long himself had characterised them on this account, in terms which he should have felt diffident in using.  But Mr. Long had shown his own prejudices also:  for he justified the chaining of the Negroes on board the slave-vessels, on account of “their bloody, cruel, and malicious dispositions.”  But hear his commendation of some of the Aborigines of Jamaica, “who had miserably perished in caves, whither they had retired to escape the tyranny of the Spaniards.  These,” says he, “left a glorious monument of their having disdained to survive the loss of their liberty and their country.”  And yet this same historian could not perceive that this natural love of liberty might operate as strongly and as laudably in the African Negro, as in the Indian of Jamaica.

He was concerned to acknowledge that these prejudices were yet further strengthened by resentment against those who had taken an active part in the abolition of the Slave Trade.  But it was never the object of these to throw a stigma on the whole body of the West Indians; but to prove the miserable effects of the trade.  This it was their duty to do; and if, in doing this, disgraceful circumstances had come out, it was not their fault; and it must never be forgotten that they were true.

That the slaves were exposed to great misery in the islands, was true as well from inference as from facts:  for what might not be expected from the use of arbitrary power, where the three characters of party, judge, and executioner were united!  The slaves, too, were more capable on account of their passions, than the beasts in the field, of exciting the passions of their tyrants.  To what a length the ill-treatment of them might be carried, might be learnt from, the instance which General Tottenham mentioned to have seen in the year 1780 in the streets of Bridge Town, Barbados:  “A youth about nineteen (to use his own words in the evidence), entirely naked, with an iron collar about his neck, having five long projecting spikes.  His body both before and behind was covered with wounds.  His belly and thighs were almost cut to pieces, with running ulcers all over them; and a finger might have been laid in some of the weals.  He could not sit down, because his hinder part was