be inferred from the admission of a gentleman, by whom this very plan of regulation had been recommended, and who was himself no ordinary person, but a man of discernment and legal resources.  He had proposed a limitation of the number of lashes to be given by the master or overseer for one offence.  But, after all, he candidly confessed, that his proposal was not likely to be useful, while the evidence of slaves continued inadmissible against their masters.  But he could even bring testimony to the inefficacy of such regulations.  A wretch in Barbadoes had chained a Negro girl to the floor, and flogged her till she was nearly expiring.  Captain Cook and Major Fitch, hearing her cries, broke open the door and found her.  The wretch retreated from their resentment, but cried out exultingly, “that he had only given her thirty-nine lashes (the number limited by law) at any one time; and that he had only inflicted this number three times since the beginning of the night,” adding, “that he would prosecute them for breaking open his door; and that he would flog her to death for all any one, if he pleased; and that he would give her the fourth thirty-nine before morning.”

But this plan of regulation was not only inefficacious, but unsafe.  He entered his protest against the fatal consequences, which might result from it.  The Negros were creatures like ourselves; but they were uninformed, and their moral character was debased.  Hence they were unfit for civil rights.  To use these properly they must be gradually restored to that level, from which they had been so unjustly degraded.  To allow them an appeal to the laws, would be to awaken in them a sense of the dignity of their nature.  The first return of life, after a swoon, was commonly a convulsion, dangerous at once to the party himself and to all around him.  You should first prepare them for the situation, and not bring the situation to them.  To be under the protection of the law was in fact to be a freeman; and to unite slavery and freedom in one condition was impracticable.  The abolition, on the other hand, was exactly such an agent as the case required.  All hopes of supplies from the Coast being cut off, breeding would henceforth become a serious object of attention; and the care of this, as including better clothing and feeding, and milder discipline, would extend to innumerable particulars, which an act of assembly could neither specify nor enforce.  The horrible system, too, which many had gone upon, of working out their slaves in a few years, and recruiting their gangs with imported Africans, would receive its death-blow from the abolition of the trade.  The opposite would force itself on the most unfeeling heart.  Ruin would stare a man in the face, if he were not to conform to it.  The non-resident owners would then express themselves in the terms of Sir Philip Gibbs, “that he should consider it as the fault of his manager, if he were not to keep up the number of his slaves.”