The regulations can owe little to consent. Everything
must be the creature of power. Hence it is that regulations must be
multiplied, particularly as you have two parties to deal with. The
planter you must at once restrain and support, and you must control at
the same time that you ease the servant. This necessarily makes the work
a matter of care, labor, and expense. It becomes in its nature complex.
But I think neither the object impracticable nor the expense
intolerable; and I am fully convinced that the cause of humanity would
be far more benefited by the continuance of the trade and servitude,
regulated and reformed, than by the total destruction of both or either.
What I propose, however, is but a beginning of a course of measures
which an experience of the effects of the evil and the reform will
enable the legislature hereafter to supply and correct.
I need not observe to you, that the forms are often neglected, penalties
not provided, &c., &c., &c. But all this is merely mechanical, and what
a couple of days' application would set to rights.
I have seen what has been done by the West Indian Assemblies. It is
arrant trifling.
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