The immediate abolitionists hold that the change from slavery to freedom cannot be too sudden.  They say that the first step in raising the slave from his degradation should be that of making him a proper subject of law, by putting him in possession of himself.  This position they rest on the ground both of justice and expediency, which indeed they believe to be inseparable.  With exceptions too trifling to affect the question, they believe the laborer who feels no stimulus but that of wages and no restraint but that of law, is the most profitable, not only to himself and society at large, but to any employer other than a brutal tyrant.  The benefit of this role they claim for every man and woman living within this republic, till on fair trial the proper tribunal shall have judged them unworthy of it.  They deny both the justice and expediency of permitting any degree of ignorance or debasement to work the forfeiture of self-ownership, and pronounce slavery continued for such a cause the worst of all, inasmuch as it is the robbery of the poor because he is poor.

What light was thrown upon this doctrine by the process of abolition in the British West Indies from the 1st of August 1834 to the 1st of June 1837, may be seen in the work of Messrs. Thome and Kimball entitled, “Emancipation in the West Indies.”  That light continues to shine.  Bermuda and Antigua, in which the slaves passed instantaneously out of absolute slavery into full freedom, are living witnesses of the blessing of heaven upon immediate emancipation.  In Antigua, one of the old sugar colonies, where slavery had had its full sway there has been especially a fair test of immediatism, and the increasing prosperity of the island does the utmost honor to the principle.  After the fullest inquiry on the point, Messrs. Thome and Kimball say of this island:—­

“There is not a class, or party, or sect, who do not esteem the abolition of slavery as a special blessing to them.  The rich, because it relieved them of “property” which was fast becoming a disgrace, as it had always been a vexation and a tax, and because it has emancipated them from the terrors of insurrection, which kept them all their life-time subject to bondage.  The poor whites—­because it lifted from off them the yoke of civil oppression.  The free colored population—­because it gave the death blow to the prejudice that crushed them, and opened the prospect of social, civil, and political equality with the whites.  The slaves—­because it broke open their dungeons, led them out to liberty, and gave them, in one munificent donation, their wives, their children, their bodies, their souls—­everything.”

In the emphatic language of the Governor, “It was universally admitted that emancipation had been a great blessing to the island.”

In November 1837, Lord Brougham thus summed up the results of the Antigua experiment in a speech in the House of Lords:—­