“We did and do declare the whip to be essential to West India discipline, ay, as essential, my Lord Calthorpe, as the freedom of the press and the trial by jury to the liberty of the subject in Britain, and to be justified on equally legitimate ground.  The comfort, welfare, and happiness of our laboring classes cannot subsist without it.”

These specimens of the fierceness of abuse with which the Government was assailed may perhaps prepare the reader for that last resort of indignant discontent on the part of the governed,—­the threat of secession!  Yes; Jamaica will break away from the tyranny of which she is the much abused object, she will free herself from the oppression of the mother country, and then,—­what next?—­she will seek for friendship and protection from the United States!  How soon this threat, if persisted in and carried out into action, would have been silenced by the thunder of British cannon, we need not stay to consider.

To this clamor of the opposition the more timid of the Anti-Slavery party were disposed to yield, at least for a season.  The Government showed little disposition to press the improvements which it had recommended.  Mr. Canning seemed apprehensive that he had committed himself too far, and was inclined to postpone, to wait for a season, to give the West Indians time for reflection, before legislating further.  The chief advocate of the slave began to realize, that, of those who had encouraged and cooeperated with him, but few, in a moment of real difficulty, could be relied upon.  But he was not to be baffled.  “Good, honest Buxton” had made up his mind that the world should be somewhat the better for his having lived in it, and he had chosen as the object of his beneficent labors the very lowest of his fellow-subjects,—­the negro slave of the West Indies.  He was, moreover, a vigorous thinker and an invincible debater, and, once embarked in this cause, he had no thought of drawing back.  So exclusive was his zeal, that at one time Mr. O’Connell, vexed that the claims of his constituents were set aside, electrified the House by exclaiming, “Oh!  I wish we were blacks!” The Irish orator had all along supported the Abolition cause, and spoken words of good cheer to Mr. Buxton; but now his impatient patriotism finds vent in exclaiming,—­“If the Irish people were but black, we should have the honorable member from Weymouth coming down as large as life, supported by all the ‘friends of humanity’ in the back rows, to advocate their cause.”

There was truth here, as well as wit, showing not only Mr. Buxton’s absorption in the cause which he had espoused, but his inspiring influence on other minds.  His indomitable energy was always sure to grow stronger after defeat, and the strength of his own belief in the justice of his cause of itself increased the faith of its friends.