The measure of success which has crowned the experiment of emancipation in Antigua—­an experiment tried under so many adverse circumstances, and with comparatively few local advantages—­is highly encouraging to slaveholders in our country.  It must be evident that the balance of advantages between the situation of Antigua and that of the South, is decidedly in favor of the latter.  The South has her resident proprietors, her resources of wealth, talent, and enterprise, and her preponderance of white population; she also enjoys a regularity of seasons, but rarely disturbed by desolating droughts, a bracing climate, which imparts energy and activity to her laboring population, and comparatively numerous wants to stimulate and press the laborer up to the working mark; she has close by her side the example of a free country, whose superior progress in internal improvements, wealth, the arts and sciences, morals and religion, all ocular demonstration to her of her own wretched policy, and a moving appeal in favor of abolition; and above all, site has the opportunity of choosing her own mode, and of ensuring all the blessings of a voluntary and peaceable manumission, while the energies, the resources, the sympathies, and the prayers of the North, stand pledged to her assistance.

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CHAPTER III.

FACTS AND TESTIMONY.

We have reserved the mass of facts and testimony, bearing immediately upon slavery in America, in order that we might present them together in a condensed furor, under distinct heads.  These heads, it will be perceived, consist chiefly of propositions which are warmly contested in our country.  Will the reader examine these principles in the light of facts?  Will the candid of our countrymen—­whatever opinions they may hitherto hate entertained on this subject—­hear the concurrent testimony of numerous planters, legislators, lawyers, physicians, and merchants, who have until three years past been wedded to slavery by birth, education, prejudice, associations, and supposed interest, but who have since been divorced from all connection with the system?

In most cases we shall give the names, the stations, and business of our witnesses; in a few instances, in which we were requested to withhold the name, we shall state such circumstances as will serve to show the standing and competency of the individuals.  If the reader should find in what follows, very little testimony unfavorable to emancipation, he may know the reason to be, that little was to be gleaned from any part of Antigua.  Indeed, we may say that, with very few exceptions, the sentiments here recorded as coming from individuals, are really the sentiments of the whole community.  There is no such thing known in Antigua as an opposing, disaffected party.  So complete and thorough has been the change in public opinion, that it would be now disreputable to speak against emancipation.