Union.  He is telling them of the munificent rewards offered by slaveholders, for the heads of the most distinguished advocates for freedom in this country.  He is moving the British Churches to send out to the churches of America the most solemn appeals, reproving, rebuking, and exhorting them with all long suffering and patience to abandon the sin of slavery immediately.  Where then I ask, will the name of George Thompson stand on the page of History?  Among the honorable, or the base?

What can I say more, my friends, to induce you to set your hands, and heads, and hearts, to this great work of justice and mercy.  Perhaps you have feared the consequences of immediate Emancipation, and been frightened by all those dreadful prophecies of rebellion, bloodshed and murder, which have been uttered.  “Let no man deceive you;” they are the predictions of that same “lying spirit” which spoke through the four thousand prophets of old, to Ahab king of Israel, urging him on to destruction. Slavery may produce these horrible scenes if it is continued five years longer, but Emancipation never will.

I can prove the safety of immediate Emancipation by history.  In St. Domingo in 1793 six hundred thousand slaves were set free in a white population of forty-two thousand.  That Island “marched as by enchantment towards its ancient splendor”, cultivation prospered, every day produced perceptible proofs of its progress, and the negroes all continued quietly to work on the different plantations, until in 1802, France determined to reduce these liberated slaves again to bondage.  It was at this time that all those dreadful scenes of cruelty occurred, which we so often unjustly hear spoken of, as the effects of Abolition.  They were occasioned not by Emancipation, but by the base attempt to fasten the chains of slavery on the limbs of liberated slaves.

In Guadaloupe eighty-five thousand slaves were freed in a white population of thirteen thousand.  The same prosperous effects followed manumission here, that had attended it in Hayti, every thing was quiet until Buonaparte sent out a fleet to reduce these negroes again to slavery, and in 1802 this institution was re-established in that Island.  In 1834, when Great Britain determined to liberate the slaves in her West India colonies, and proposed the apprenticeship system; the planters of Bermuda and Antigua, after having joined the other planters in their representations of the bloody consequences of Emancipation, in order if possible to hold back the hand which was offering the boon of freedom to the poor negro; as soon as they found such falsehoods were utterly disregarded, and Abolition must take place, came forward voluntarily, and asked for the compensation which was due to them, saying, they preferred immediate emancipation, and were not afraid of any insurrection.  And how is it with these islands now?  They are decidedly more prosperous than any of those in which the apprenticeship system was adopted, and England is now trying to abolish that system, so fully convinced is she that immediate Emancipation is the safest and the best plan.