Thoughts on Slavery and Cheap Sugar

The negroes have imbibed ideas of freedom which at no distant time will produce, by fair means or foul, a change in their condition. The planter already begins to perceive, that it is far better to be the employer of faithful and contented labourers, than the lord of men who feel their wrongs, and who wait but the first moment of revenge. Capital, the life-blood of industry, will never flow into a country till the capitalist has a pledge – a pledge no land of slaves can ever give – that the life he hazards, and the money he invests, are alike secure. Were the duty on sugar so reduced to-morrow as to put it in the power of the working man to consume as much as he required, an impulse would be given to the production of sugar which would create a demand for capital – which capital would alone be safely invested where labour is free. With a plentiful supply of labourers, no one can deny that Jamaica would be a far more eligible country for the capitalist than Cuba or Brazil; and hence the slave-trade dealers would be thrown for ever out of the markets of the world.

To put down slavery, then, we must under-sell the slave dealer. Emigration from the coast of Africa to the West Indies must be encouraged. At present wages in these islands are unnaturally high. They cannot, however, long remain so. We are glad to learn that the negroes are well off; but it cannot be expected that the West India monopoly should be continued merely that the emancipated slave may drink at his ease his Madeira or Champagne. It will be well for him if he prepares himself for the change that must shortly come. It is not to be expected that the proprietor who cultivates his estate at a loss, should continue to employ his capital without return. Unless there is a change, that capital must be withdrawn; and, thrown upon his own resources, the negro labourer will sink into a state of degradation hopeless and complete.[10 - This is no mere supposition. At a public meeting held since this pamphlet was written, consisting of West India Proprietors, the Earl of Harewood stated that he had latterly been losing twelve hundred a-year by his estate in Jamaica, and that in consequence, he had ordered it to lie fallow.] Should it be found that the emigration scheme will not work well, it by no means follows that our only alternative is to continue the monopoly. A late writer[11 - Vide Jamaica, by the Rev. Mr. Philippo.], on the state of Jamaica, expresses it as his opinion that the resources of the island are not above half developed; he declares that the implements used in the cultivation of the cane are in the most primitive state imaginable; and that were but the improvements in machines introduced there, which have obtained elsewhere, there would be no need whatever for additional labourers.

This may be true of Jamaica, but it will not apply equally to other parts of the West Indies, where labourers are needed; and Africa is the quarter to which we must naturally turn for a supply. We find men in a state of practical slavery – sunk in the lowest scale of being; and we maintain the way to humanise them, to give them habits of industry and ideas of trade, is to bring them into contact with the advanced civilisation of the west. Thanks to the labours of the missionaries, they will find their emancipated fellow-countrymen intelligent, moral, and religious men. They will become subject to the same ameliorating influences – old things will be put away, principles of good will be formed – the savage will be lost in the advancing dignity of the man.

Let the West Indian proprietor, then, take the degraded savage and convert him into a useful member of society, and in the same manner let the free-trader go and convert the slave-owner into an honest man. In both cases a restrictive policy has been found to be fraught with inevitable ill. It were time that they both should retire. Our aim should be to create in slave states a public opinion against the vile system that stains the land, and not to excite feelings of enmity against ourselves because we exclude them from our market, and seek to brand them as outcasts from society. Not by such pharisaical modes of procedure shall we obtain our end. If we would do a man good, we must teach him to look upon us as friends, and not foes. We have no right to shut up a man in his guilt; and, as a nation is but an aggregate of individuals, the principles of action that obtain in the one case must be equally valid with respect to the other. We heap contumely and scorn on the heads of the American slaveholders, and refuse to do business with the merchants of Brazil, and by such conduct directly deprive ourselves of what influence for good we might otherwise have it in our power to wield. It is time that we turn over a new leaf; that we act more in accordance with Him who makes his sun to shine, and his rain to descend, upon the good and the bad; that we speak in friendship to our fellow-man, however degraded he may be, and win him over to the adoption of that which is just and true. Experience, the great teacher of mankind, has shown in a thousand instances that in our efforts to put down slavery by restrictive policy and armed suppression, we have, at the most lavish expenditure of treasure and life, done nothing but create misery and ill-will. It is the part of a wise man to abandon a plan which he sees has entirely failed. We may, by so doing, expose ourselves to the charge of inconsistency, – the stupid sneer, the unmeaning laugh, of men to whom experience may preach in vain, may be ours; but we shall have the consolation, the sure reward, of men who, seeking that which will promote the happiness of the family of man, when they find themselves in the wrong course, immediately abandon it for the right.

In the preceding pages we have endeavoured to advocate Free Trade, as the only one thing by which slavery can be destroyed. We now come to a subject of equal importance – the claims of our countrymen at home. We plead not for the Manchester warehouseman, cribbed, cabined, and confined by our wretched system of commercial policy, but we plead for the overtaxed and under-fed hard-working men and women of Great Britain. It is well to be tenderly alive to the concerns of the West Indian negro, but the charity that exhausts itself on them partakes of the same mongrel character as that sensibility which sheds floods of tears over the feigned distresses of the stage, and looks unmoved upon the miseries of a world. A reduction in the price of sugar would most certainly be an inestimable boon to the working man. Such a step taken by government would produce no increase in the consumption of sugar on the part of the middle or higher classes, but it would enable the poorer classes at once to use one of the most nutritious and essential articles of food. If you would preserve a man from drunkenness, make his home happy; let him have something better than the meagre fare which too generally awaits him. On the government which, by its interference, deprives the operative of the fair fruit of his labour, which drives him to the alehouse, to avoid the home rendered wretched by their accursed agency, rest the blame and guilt occasioned by the degradation and destruction of the body and soul of man. Different is the judgment of Heaven from that of the world. Could our voice reach the ears of our senators, we would ask them to pause ere they continued in a course of legislation which has been a fruitful source of vice – a course of legislation which, like the destroying angel, has spread death through the land. We would say to them, “Law-makers, see there the wretched slave of vice; the fault is not his, but yours. From your costly clubs, from your glittering saloons, flushed with revelry and wine, you have gone to the House, and, in the fulness of your power and pride, declared that his hearth should be desolate – that the crust he gnaws he should earn at the price of his life – that misery and want, like attendant handmaids, should follow on his steps; and if he has shrunk abashed from their presence – if his heart has failed him in the hour of need – if he has forgotten his manhood and his immortality – if he has joined in the hideous orgies of the drunken and the desolate – if he has sunk into the condition of the beast – the crime, and shame, and curse, be yours. And you may well shudder with an unwonted fear at the thought of the hour when Heaven shall require an account at your hands – when it shall be asked you why you laid on your brother a burden greater than he could bear, and why you blotted out the image of divinity that was planted there.”

Let us just look at the history of the sugar trade, – we shall soon see how well protection has worked. In 1824, the duty on sugar was —

In 1830, the West India duty was reduced to 24s., the East India to 32s., which, as the editor of the Economist has well remarked, was “just so much more put into the pockets of the producers, so long as the 63s. on foreign sugar was continued.” In 1836, a slight change was introduced. The duty on East India was equalised, so that the duty was —

In 1824, we imported —

The duty on East India being equalised, and that on foreign remaining as before, we imported in 1840 —

Between 1824 and 1840, the population had increased five millions, and yet there had been an actual falling off in the consumption of sugar of no less than 377,302 cwts. and a loss of revenue of £192,910, to say nothing of the consequent loss of employment which the five millions would otherwise have enjoyed, resulting from the impulse given to manufactures and shipping, by an increase in the sugar trade. The cost, exclusive of duty, of 3,764,710 cwts. retained for home consumption in the year, as calculated by Mr. Porter, at the Gazette average prices, was £9,156,872. The cost of the same quantity of Brazil or Havanna sugar, of equal quality, would have been £4,141,181, so that in one year we paid £5,015,691 more than the prices which the rest of the inhabitants of Europe would have paid for an equal quantity of sugar. In that year the total value of our exports to our sugar colonies was under £4,000,000, so that we should have “gained a million of money in that one year by following the true principle of buying in the cheapest market, even though we had made the sugar-growers a present of all the goods which they took from us.”[12 - Porter’s Progress of the Nation, vol. iii.]

The Brazilian ambassador has been in vain endeavouring to effect a reduction of the duty imposed on foreign sugar. The reign of monopoly is to be continued yet a little longer. We are to go on throwing away our money, and losing our trade. The working man’s food is taxed out of all proportion. We may not use the cheap sugar of Brazil, which is imported – slave-grown as it is – into England, and, here refined, is then sold to the settler in Australia, or the emancipated West Indian labourer, for fourpence a pound. No, the unemancipated white labourer must pay a high price for his adulterated sugar; for be it remembered that 400,000 cwts. of various ingredients are annually used, and which, cheapening the price, though then it is much higher than that of the genuine article would be, were we allowed to import it for home consumption from Brazil, is consumed principally by the lower orders of society. The necessaries of life in this country being thus heavily taxed, the cost of our manufactures is raised, and, as a consequence, the German under-sells us in the Brazil market; and, more wonderful still, the American enters our own colonies, such as the Cape of Good Hope, and under-sells us there; and thus it is that we are punished for our sins. It must also be remembered that, in spite of our virtual exclusion of foreign produce, Java, and Cuba, and the Brazils, had grown sugar in such abundance, as that our merchants have three separate times begged permission of the government to introduce it merely for the purposes of agriculture, promising, if their request were granted, to spoil it in such a manner as that it should be totally unfit for human food.

Notwithstanding a duty of 63s. in their favour, the monopolists complain of the low price of sugar. From the circular of Messrs. Truman and Co., we find that, whilst the highest price of British sugar (West India middling to fine) is 68s. per cwt., the highest price for foreign (Havannah white) is only 28s. per cwt.; and thus they are getting nearly 150 per cent. more than we are paying for foreign sugar. Again, the lowest price of English sugar (Bengal brown) is 48s., whilst the lowest price of the foreign article (Java) is 16s. 6d., and thus getting nearly 200 per cent. more than foreign sugar can be got for, they have the impudence to grumble about low prices! Pretty cool! considering the shameless system of plundering they have been carrying on.

This immense difference in the cost of the two articles is equalised by the heavy duty imposed on the one, and the light duty upon the other: that on the highest foreign produce being 238 per cent. on the value of the sugar, whilst the duty on the highest-priced colonial sugar is but 37 per cent.; and the lowest-priced colonial sugar pays but 50 per cent. duty, whilst the lowest-priced foreign sugar actually pays 400 per cent.! Be it remembered, this goes not to the government at home, but is so much money put into the pockets of the West Indian monopolists. It is reckoned by a writer in the League that “the sum paid for sugar at the monopolists’ shops, more than it could be bought for at the Brazil shop, is £7,000,000 per annum.” The same writer gives the following statement of the case: —

And thus an article of consumption, that has now become an essential, is raised to an extravagant price to maintain a monopoly, of which even the monopolists themselves complain.

Considered as a question of revenue, it is extremely desirable that our differential duties on sugar should be abolished. The increased price we pay goes not to government, but into the monopolist’s pocket; he alone is benefited by it; the consumer pays 20s. a cwt. more than he otherwise would do to the grower of the favoured produce. Equalise the duties, and, as was exemplified in the reductions that took place in the duties on coffee, by making a decrease of price to the consumer, we get an increase of revenue. It may not be amiss to state that Mr. M‘Gregor Laird declared, in a late speech before the anniversary meeting of the Glasgow Emancipation Society, that, if the people of England consumed sugar at the same rate per head as the population of New South Wales, the annual consumption would be 900,000 tons. The Editor of the Economist has so fully proved this part of the subject, that we cannot do better than give his own words. We quote from an article headed “Free Trade and the National Debt,” that appeared in that paper on the 7th October last: —

“Our consumption of sugar last year was 3,876,465 cwts., at a cost of 65s. per cwt. (wholesale price), and, consequently, at that rate, the country paid for sugar £12,598,511. Now, there is every reason to believe that, if sugar were cheaper, the same sum would still be expended upon it, and a correspondingly increased quantity consumed. In this opinion we are supported by the very extraordinary fact that the annual consumption of sugar, which, in 1811, averaged 23¼ lbs. per head on the whole population of Great Britain and Ireland, was reduced, in 1842, in consequence of the restriction of quantity, to the rate of 15⅞lbs. per head, while the paupers in our workhouses are allowed at the rate of 23¾lbs., and the seamen in her Majesty’s service 34 lbs. per head.

“Well, then, assume that the duty on foreign sugar were reduced to 24s., the same as we now pay on colonial sugar, the price of sugar would be lowered thereby to 45s. per cwt. instead of 65s.; then the sum of £12,598,511, which we last year expended on sugar, would command 5,599,338 cwts., in place of 3,876,465 cwts., being an additional consumption, at precisely the same entire cost. Now, at present, all the revenue which is derived from sugar is from the duty of that on 24s. on that of colonial grown (the high differential duty excluding all other), and on the quantity consumed last year yielded the sum of £4,651,758. By the proposed equalisation of duties this sum would remain untouched, but an additional quantity (which at present gives no revenue at all) of 1,722,873 cwts. would, at the rate of 24s. per cwt., raise the revenue to £6,719,205.

“The result, therefore, would be, that for the same sum of money which the country expended last year in sugar, an additional quantity of 1,722,873 cwts. would be enjoyed by the community, which would only restore the average consumption of 23¼ lbs. per head of 1811, an additional revenue of £2,067,447 would be given to the State, and an increase of trade amounting to nearly £4,000,000 annually would be experienced by the dealers, merchants, and carriers of sugar.”

Now, with us all this seems very reasonable, and we are not a little surprised to find, as we certainly do, many intelligent and philanthropic men joining in the outcry against slave-grown sugar which the West India planters, those paragons of excellence and humanity, have had wit enough to raise, and which has answered their purposes remarkably well. We are told it is slave-grown. What of that? Half the Brazil slave-grown sugar is bought by British money, and refined by British skill, and then sold by British merchants all over the globe. Our cotton is slave-grown – tobacco, which yields a revenue of three million pounds and a half, is slave-grown. From the southern states of America and Mexico we import slave-grown rice, indigo, and cochineal; of the manufactures we export, half are of cotton, imported from the slave states, and upon their produce the millions of our manufacturing population depend for their subsistence. It would require no little impudence for any of the English monopolists to tell the Brazilians that we were so squeamish that we could not deal with them, because their sugar was slave-grown, when every one knows that our merchants gladly trade in and allow every one to have it cheap and good except our own hungry, wretched, and perishing poor.[13 - The following report of a speech by Mr. Cobden, in Covent-garden Theatre, is taken from the League of October 14th. The honourable gentleman said: – “What, then, is the pretence set up? Why, that we must not buy slave-grown sugar. I believe that the ambassador from the Brazils is here at present, and I think I can imagine an interview between him and the President of the Board of Trade. His excellency is admitted to an interview with all the courtesy due to his rank. He delivers his credentials; he has come to arrange a treaty on commerce. I think I see the President of the Board of Trade calling up a solemn, earnest, pious expression, and saying, You are from the Brazils, we shall be happy to trade with you, but we cannot conscientiously receive slave-grown produce. His excellency is a good man of business (most men are, who come to us from abroad to settle commercial matters.) So he says, ‘Well, then, we will see if we can trade together in some other way. What have you to sell us?’ ‘Why,’ returns the President of the Board of Trade, ‘cotton goods; in these articles we are the largest exporters in the world.’ ‘Indeed!’ exclaims his excellency. ‘Cotton did you say? where is cotton brought from?’ ‘Why,’ replies the minister, ‘hem – chiefly from the United States;’ and at once the question will be, ‘Pray, is it free-grown cotton, or slave-grown cotton?’ Now I leave you to imagine the answer, and I also leave you to picture the countenance of the President of the Board of Trade. Ay, these very men, and their connexions, who are loudest in their appeals against slave-grown sugar, have landing warehouses in Liverpool and London, and send their sugar to Russia, to China, to Turkey, to Poland, to Egypt; in short, to any country under the sun.”] They are to be taxed and fleeced to keep up the West India monopoly – their bone and blood are to be preyed on by the harpies that lust for human gore. That their desires may be gratified – that the value of their estates may be unnaturally kept up – that their vested rights, the rights of the robber and the pickpocket, if such a term can be applied to them, may be preserved – the English labourer, from a state of honest independence, is degraded into pauperism, dies in the parish workhouse, and rots in the parish vault. Shame on this Christian land, with its stately churches, its noble mansions, with its swarms of well-paid luxurious priests, with its peers of unrivalled wealth and power, with its sons boasting their royal blood – shame on such men, that for one hour they suffer so wretched a system to continue! It is well that they should talk of their love to religion and law, but the religion and law that connive at crying abuses and monstrous wrongs, can neither please Heaven nor bless man: they evidently are unworthy of the name they claim for themselves.

To those who are really in earnest in the cry against slave-grown produce, we say, that it is abundantly proved that the West Indian monopoly tends directly to keep up slavery. If that were abolished, we might expect to see slavery destroyed. The monopoly enables the West Indian planter to pay an unreasonably high price for labour, in consequence of which there is an importation of labour into the market – an unnatural demand is created. The high price the West Indian planter gets for his sugar, makes it answer his purpose to pay more for hire than his rivals can, and the consequence is, that the neighbouring European colonists are afraid to emancipate their slaves, knowing well, that directly they would leave them for the monopoly market, and they would be left without a hand to till the soil. For instance, we give the following case: – A large slave-owner, in Dutch Guiana, thus addressed the editor of the Economist, when that gentleman was at Amsterdam. “We should be glad,” said he, “to follow your example, and emancipate our slaves, if it were possible; but as long as your differential duties are maintained it will be impossible. Here is an account-sale of sugar produced in our colony, netting a return of £11 per hogshead to the planter in Surinam; and here is an account-sale of similar sugar sold in London, netting a return of £33 to the planter in Demerara; the difference ascribable only to your differential duty. The fields of these two classes of planters are separated only by a few ditches. Now, such is the effort made by the planter in Demerara to extend his cultivation, to secure the high price of £33, that he is importing free labourers from the hills of Hindostan, and from the coast of Africa, at great cost; and is willing to pay higher prices than even labour will command in Europe. Let us then emancipate our slaves, which, if it had any effect, would confer the privilege of the choice of employer, and Dutch Guiana would be depopulated in a day – an easy means of increasing the supply of labour to the planters of Demerara, at the cost of entire annihilation of the cultivation of the estates in Surinam. But abandon your differential duties; give us the same price for our produce, and thus enable us to pay the same rate of wages, and I, for one, will not object to liberate my slaves to-morrow.”[14 - Economist, Sept. 16, 1843.]

We would not damp the sympathy which is felt for the enslaved producer of sugar in Brazil; but we would claim some portion of that sympathy on behalf of the toil-worn consumer at home. The Lancashire operatives, starving in our midst, have ties on us which we must not and cannot overlook. Let their case be considered – let their prayers be heard. Let justice be done to them. They are our brethren, and their case is ours. Let us seek for them the abolition of all monopoly – for one does but involve another – they are all the results of the same impure system – they all stand and fall together. In every country under heaven the friends of the people are ranged on the one side, and their foes and the friends of monopoly on the other. If a monopoly of legislation had never existed at home, a monopoly of trade would never have existed in favour of any colony or nation under the sun. Let the legislative monopoly continue, and we shall not only peril our trade abroad, but our very existence at home, and England’s glory shall vanish as a dream. All that has been written by historians, and said by orators, and sung by poets, of a nation’s gradual decline and ignominious extinction, shall we realise in her hapless fate.

The Mayor of Liverpool, at a public meeting there, was heard to say, that our legislators were gentlemen. Whether this was said ironically, or otherwise, we know not. The assertion certainly contains a great deal of truth. We cannot look at one single act of theirs without finding it full of blunders and bulls. By their own folly we lost half our American market. Brazil, the fourth foreign market we have, we are about to lose. Our artizans are overworked to raise annually four or five million pounds’ worth of goods, which are then taken, and, as it were, drowned in the bottom of the sea. What a man might have for once buying, the legislature, in its wisdom, makes him pay for twice. It decrees that a man must toil all day for that which he might otherwise have for half a day’s work. What admirable policy! Blessed are its effects, in the misery it has shed over the homes of our operatives – in the life-blood it has wrung from the labourer’s heart! It is time that whatever of manhood there is left in this Saxon and once happy land – whatever of stern valour that once distinguished us from the nations of the earth, and which the struggle for the pittance that barely keeps up life has not frittered away, or which the Union House has not starved out – should arouse and join in that cry which demands that man’s rights should be given back to him – that his serfdom be abolished – that his brotherhood be owned – that England should no longer be one vast poor-house – that life should no longer be a source of sorrow, but of joy – no longer what priestism and class legislation have made it, a thing to be feared and shunned, but a boon to be desired – that that should be a blessing, which in times past, was a bitter curse.

notes

1

Vide the attack on George Thompson and John Bright, in the Standard of Saturday, May 18.

2

Vide Report of Select Committee on West Coast of Africa. Part I.

3

Vide Colonial Gazette, Nov. 1842.

4

Bandinell, p. 222.

5

Ibid. p. 161.

6

Philanthropist, No. XI. page 163.

7

Vide the Supplement to the Spectator newspaper, April 15th, 1843.

8

Vide “Antigua and the Antiguans.”

9

Vide “The Effect of an Alteration in the Duties on the Condition of the People of England and the Negro Slave, considered. By Macgregor Laird, Esq.”

10

This is no mere supposition. At a public meeting held since this pamphlet was written, consisting of West India Proprietors, the Earl of Harewood stated that he had latterly been losing twelve hundred a-year by his estate in Jamaica, and that in consequence, he had ordered it to lie fallow.

11

Vide Jamaica, by the Rev. Mr. Philippo.

12

Porter’s Progress of the Nation, vol. iii.

13

The following report of a speech by Mr. Cobden, in Covent-garden Theatre, is taken from the League of October 14th. The honourable gentleman said: – “What, then, is the pretence set up? Why, that we must not buy slave-grown sugar. I believe that the ambassador from the Brazils is here at present, and I think I can imagine an interview between him and the President of the Board of Trade. His excellency is admitted to an interview with all the courtesy due to his rank. He delivers his credentials; he has come to arrange a treaty on commerce. I think I see the President of the Board of Trade calling up a solemn, earnest, pious expression, and saying, You are from the Brazils, we shall be happy to trade with you, but we cannot conscientiously receive slave-grown produce. His excellency is a good man of business (most men are, who come to us from abroad to settle commercial matters.) So he says, ‘Well, then, we will see if we can trade together in some other way. What have you to sell us?’ ‘Why,’ returns the President of the Board of Trade, ‘cotton goods; in these articles we are the largest exporters in the world.’ ‘Indeed!’ exclaims his excellency. ‘Cotton did you say? where is cotton brought from?’ ‘Why,’ replies the minister, ‘hem – chiefly from the United States;’ and at once the question will be, ‘Pray, is it free-grown cotton, or slave-grown cotton?’ Now I leave you to imagine the answer, and I also leave you to picture the countenance of the President of the Board of Trade. Ay, these very men, and their connexions, who are loudest in their appeals against slave-grown sugar, have landing warehouses in Liverpool and London, and send their sugar to Russia, to China, to Turkey, to Poland, to Egypt; in short, to any country under the sun.”

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