Then came Sir Robert Peel to the two grand and suddenly discovered panaceas of the late Government, for recruiting the exhausted revenue, and relieving the general distress—­viz. “cheap sugar,” and “cheap bread.”

1st, As to foreign sugar:—­

“I clearly and freely admit that those restrictions which cannot be justified should be removed, and that the commerce of the country should be perfectly free, whenever it can possibly be so; but I consider the article of sugar to be wholly exempt from the principle of free trade.” * * * “The question now is this—­whether, after the sacrifices which this country has made for the suppression of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery, and the glorious results that have ensued, and are likely to ensue, from these sacrifices—­whether we shall run the risk of losing the benefit of those sacrifices, and tarnishing for ever that glory, by admitting to the British market sugar the produce of foreign slavery.” * * * “If you admit it, it will come from Brazil and Cuba.  In Brazil, the slave-trade exists in full force; in Cuba, it is unmitigated in its extent and horrors.  The sugar of Cuba is the finest in the world; but in Cuba, slavery is unparalleled in its horrors.  I do not at all overstate the fact, when I say, that 50,000 slaves are annually landed in Cuba.  That is the yearly importation into the island; but, when you take into consideration the vast numbers that perish before they leave their own coasts, the still greater number that die amidst the horrors of the middle passage, and the number that are lost at sea, you will come to the inevitable conclusion, that the number landed in Cuba—­50,000 annually—­is but a slight indication of the number shipped in Africa, or of the miseries and destruction that have taken place among them during their transport thither.  If you open the markets of England to the sugar of Cuba, you may depend on it that you give a great stimulus to slavery, and the slave-trade.”  Sir Robert Peel then pointed out peculiar and decisive distinctions between the case of sugar, and that of cotton, tobacco, and coffee; that, though all of them were the produce of slave labour—­First, we cannot now reject the cotton of the United States, without endangering to the last degree the manufacturing prosperity of the kingdom.  Secondly, of all the descriptions of slave produce, sugar is the most cruelly destructive of human life—­the proportion of deaths in a sugar plantation being infinitely greater than on those of cotton or coffee.  Thirdly, slave grown sugar has never been admitted to consumption in this country.[13] He also assigned two great co-operating reasons for rejecting slave-grown sugar:—­“That the people of England required the great experiment of emancipation to be fairly tried; and they would not think it fairly tried, if, at this moment, when the colonies were struggling with such difficulties, we were to open the floodgates of a foreign supply, and inundate the British market with sugar, the produce of slave-labour;” adopting the very words of the Whig Vice-President of the Board of Trade, Mr Labouchere, on the 25th June 1840.  The other reason was, “that our immense possessions in the East Indies give us the means, and afford us every facility, for acquiring sugar, the produce of free labour, to an illimitable extent.”