most distinctly shown that the experience of Antigua and the Bermudas is demonstrative to show that without any state of preparation, without any indenture of apprenticeship at all, he is fit to be intrusted with his freedom, and will work voluntarily as a free laborer for hire.  But I have also demonstrated from the same experience, and by reference to the same state of facts, that a more quiet, inoffensive, peaceable, innocent people, is not to be found on the face of this earth than the negro—­not in their own unhappy country, but after they have been removed from it and enslaved in your Christian land, made the victim of the barbarizing demon of civilized powers, and has all this character, if it were possible to corrupt it, and his feelings, if it were possible to pervert them, attempted to be corrupted and perverted by Christian and civilized men, and that in this state, with all incentives to misdemeanor poured around him, and all the temptation to misconduct which the arts and artifices and examples of civilized man can give hovering over him—­that after this transition is made from slavery to apprenticeship, and from slavery to absolute freedom, a negro’s spirit has been found to rival the unbroken tranquillity of the Caribbean Seas. (Cheers.) This was not the state of things we expected, my lords; and in proof that it was not so, I have but to refer you to the statute book itself.  On what ground did you enact the intermediate state of indenture apprenticeship, and on what arguments did you justify it?  You felt and acknowledged that the negro had a right to be free, and that you had no right to detain him in bondage.  Every one admitted this, but in the prevailing ignorance of their character it was apprehended that they could not be made free at once, and that time was requisite to train the negro to receive the boon it was intended bestowing upon him.

This was the delusion which prevailed, and which was stated in the preamble of the statute—­the same delusion which had made the men on one side state and the other to believe that it was necessary to pay the slave-owners for the loss it was supposed they would sustain.  But it was found to be a baseless fear, and the only result of the phantom so conjured up was a payment of twenty millions to the conjurors. (Hear, and a laugh.) Now, I maintain that had we known what we now know of the character of the negroes, neither would this compensation have been given to the slave-owners, nor we have been guilty of proposing to keep the negro in slavery five years, after we were decided that he had a right to his freedom.  The noble and learned lord here proceeded to contend that up to the present time the slave-owners, so far from being sufferers, had been gainers by the abolition of slavery and the enactment of the system of apprenticeship, and that consequently up to the present moment nothing had occurred to entitle them to a claim upon the compensation allotted by parliament.  The slave-owners might