a mitigation of slavery. It is due to some able and distinguished
friends of the negro race to state, that they all along were averse to
this plan of a transition state. Lord Howick, then in the Colonial
Office as Under-Secretary, went so far as to leave the department, from
his dislike of this part of the measure. Mr. Buxton and others protested
against it. Even its friends intimated that they wished the period of
apprenticeship to end in 1838 instead of 1840; but there was a general
belief of the preparatory step being necessary,--a belief apparently
founded on experience of the negro character, and indeed of the vicious
tendency of all slavery, to extinguish the power of voluntary labour, as
well as to make the sudden change to freedom unsafe for the peace of the
community. The fact soon dispersed these opinions. Antigua in a minute
emancipated all her slaves to the number of thirty thousand and upwards.
Not a complaint was ever heard of idleness or indolence; and, far from
any breach of the peace being induced by the sudden change in the
condition of the people, the Christmas of 1833 was the first, for the
last twenty years, that martial law was not proclaimed, in order to
preserve the public peace. Similar evidence from Jamaica and other
islands, proving the industrious and peaceable habits of the
apprentices, showed that there was nothing peculiar in the circumstances
of Antigua.

An important occurrence is now to be recorded as having exercised a
powerful influence upon the question of immediate emancipation. Joseph
Sturge, of Birmingham, a member of the Society of Friends, stricken with
a sense of the injustice perpetrated against the African race, repaired
to the West Indies, in order that he might examine, with his own eyes,
the real state of the question between the two classes. He was
accompanied by John Scoble and Thomas Harvey; and these able, excellent,
and zealous men returned in a few months with such ample evidence of the