The Mauritius, however, still held out, and on the Mauritius the hand of
the Imperial Parliament must and will be laid, to enforce mercy and
justice on those to whom mercy and justice have so long called aloud in
vain. In truth, if the case for instant emancipation was strong
everywhere, it was in no quarter half so strong as in the Mauritius; and
the distribution of the grant by Parliament to this Colony was the most
unjustifiable, and even incomprehensible. For, elsewhere, there existed
at least a title to the slave, over whom an unjust and unchristian law
recognised the right of property. But in the Mauritius there was not,
nor is there now, one negro to whom a good title is clearly provable.
The atrocious conduct of Governors and other functionaries, in conniving
at the Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, had filled that Colony with
thousands of negroes, every one of whom was carried there by the
commission of felony, long after Slave Trading had been declared a
capital crime by the law of the land, as by the law of nature it always
was. Sir George Murray, when Colonial Secretary of State, had admitted,
that at least thirty thousand of the negroes in the settlement were
nominally slaves, but in reality free, having been carried thither
contrary to law. He understated it by twenty thousand or more: yet on
all these negroes, in respect of property, were two millions and more
claimed: for all these the compensation money was given and taken, which
Parliament had lavishly bestowed. How then was it possible to doubt,
that every slave in the Mauritius should receive his freedom, when the
only ground alleged for not singling out and liberating this fifty
thousand, was the inability to distinguish them from the rest? If ten
men are tried for an offence, and it is clear that five are innocent,
though you cannot distinguish them from their companions, what jury will
hesitate in acquitting the whole, on the ordinary principle of its being
better five guilty should escape than five guiltless suffer? The same is