elder; so that good order and harmony may be preserved among you, which will assuredly draw down the blessing of the Most High. But if you have not wherewithal to cultivate and improve the plantation yourselves, we advise you to hire yourselves for a season to whom you please, as also the plantation, if you think it necessary, till you acquire a sufficiency to go on yourselves; but in every step you take of this kind, always remember the good of the whole. And as soon as you can make a beginning on the plantation yourselves, with cotton and provisions, we would by all means have you to do it, that you may not be scattered and too much divided; but endeavour to dwell together, and be content with food and raiment; and a blessing will certainly attend you under the influence of such a disposition. Tell Dorcas Vanterpool we are much obliged to her for her friendly care and attendance of poor John Venture and Harry, during their sickness. We shall be pleased to hear how you go on by any opportunity, and that you cautiously maintain a good report among the neighbours. Live in love among yourselves, and the peace of Him who passeth all understanding will assuredly be with you and yours; which we earnestly desire and pray for, being your sincere friends and well-wishers,

(Signed) SAMUEL NOTTINGHAM. (Signed) MARY NOTTINGHAM. To George Nottingham, one of the negroes belonging to the East-End Plantation, late the property of Samuel Nottingham, at Fathog Bay, in Tortola.'

"In the year 1822 this little colony of free persons was visited several times by two highly respectable gentlemen; on whose authority we are enabled to state the following particulars: Of the original persons liberated, nine are still alive; besides whom there are twenty-five of their children, and nine grand-children; making in all forty-three persons. The whole of them reside on the same plantation, which they have ever since cultivated. Half of it is chiefly in provisions, and the rest is used as pasturage for their stock, which consists of twenty-eight cows, thirteen goats, and thirteen hogs. Formerly they cultivated cotton, but, the price falling very low, they did not continue to plant it. Jeffery Not. tingham, one of those originally emancipated, exclusive of his share in the plantation and stock, possesses five acres of land and a house in Spanishtown, and a vessel of twenty-three feet keel. Diana and Eve (born since 1776,) have cach a boat of seventeen and fourteen feet-keel. For some

years the seasons were so bad, that they found it difficult to get water for their stock, and got little return for their labour; but still they had been able to support VOL. XIV.

themselves, and to acquire the property mentioned above, while they increased in number from twenty-five to forty-three. Not one of them is now in debt; and their property is free from all incumbrance. Twelve of the grown-up persons are members of the Methodist Society, and, with their children, attend regularly the Methodist chapel at East-End, except in case of sickness. During the whole period since their emancipation, none of them have been sued in court, or brought before a magistrate, to answer to any complaint. Only one of them once obtained a warrant against a person who had assaulted him, who begged his pardon and was forgiven. The same person, on coming from sea, was arrested the day he landed for a capitation tax on free persons, of which he had not been apprized, and put into prison. The next day he paid the money, about eighteen dollars, and was released. Several of them can read and write. Jeffery's wife, Grace, acts as shoolmistress. She reads well. They have lately built three houses in their village, of wood, and shingled. The whole of their houses had been destroyed by the hurricane of 1819, and have since been rebuilt. They are a fine healthy race, all black, having intermarried with each other; and seem to dwell very happily together.'

Now, we would put the question to Mr Baring, Whether it would have been more advantageous for the interests either of the individuals or of the state, that Mr Nottingham's twenty-five slaves had continued slaves, (liable to all the risks of inhuman owners and overseers, and all the other evils of that condition, and-particularly to that progressive diminution of their numbers, which has been the common fate of the slaves in almost all our colonies, and among the rest in Tortola ;) or that they should have been living free and in comfort for nearly fifty years, during which they have accumulated some property, and have increased from twenty-five to forty-three? And, as far as advantage to this country goes, we will venture to say that the fortythree Nottinghams consume more of British produce and manufactures in a year, and promote the traffic of Tortola itself more, than three times the number of slaves would do. But Mr Baring will say, this is a single instance. True; but why is it so ? Not because there are not

many slaves who would have equally rewarded the benevolence of their master, but because there has been but one Nottingham."

Now, nothing can be more delightful than the behaviour of these wor

thy Quakers; it is impossible not to feel their excellence, to admire, to love them. But for what purpose are stories like this the staple of such a 3 M

THE next speaker was from Ireland, with the characteristic name of Lawless. He arose indeed et potus, et exlex, and poured forth a flood of Irish oratory, on the usual topics which afford flowers and figures to the oppressed people of that pacific land. Being himself a gentleman of the press, conducting a paper which circulates a few quires in and about Belfast, he was particularly vociferous on the advantages mankind in general, and Ireland in particular, derive from the freedom of that engine. Of the universal Whig passion for the freedom of the press, I have spoken already; but people who do not look at the actual state of the thing in Ireland, contenting themselves with taking bawling for facts, may not be aware how admirably a panegyric on this favourite subject comes from a man of Mr Lawless's Irish faction. In Ireland, as in England, the factious press had it all their own way for a long time. There was to be seen little talent in their newspaper world, but that little was active in traducing the institutions of the country. Besides, they had firm aid from abroad.-Tom Moore sung over the miseries of Ireland-Jeffrey and Co. howled over them; and all together, they contrived to cover the loyal men and the Protestants of Ireland with the imputation of bigotry and tyranny, just in the same way as the same agency covered us Tories with the imputed disgrace of being patrons of slavery, and victims of blockheadism. At last, however, the prestige began to wear away, and then in Ireland the real nature of the affection" the friends of liberty all over the world" entertained for the press, shone forth in its true colours. Your readers, Christopher, would feel little entertainment in puzzling through the petty details of the provincial press of Ireland, which

is even lower than our newspaper world in Scotland ;* suffice it to say, that, to go no farther back than this very year, the Coryphæus of Irish demagogues, Mr O'Connel, employed his own clerk to act as prosecutor on be half of the Roman Catholic clergy, in a libel action against the Evening Mail, for a series of general reflections, implicating no individual whatever, directly or indirectly-that the same gentleman advised an action against the same print, for copying a paragraph from a Cork paper, which it quoted-that he laid the venue of action against that Cork paper, in a county (Kerry) over which he has most considerable influence, and of which a near relation of his own is Sub-Sheriff, and had the striking of the jury-and they add, that when two fellows, one of them, by the way, son of the magna mater of Whiggery, fell on and beat, in his own house, a defenceless man, the editor of an illiberal paper, the whole of the liberal press chuckled with joy, and applauded the heroic feat. You perceive that the same people act in the same way on both sides of the water. Loud are they in praise of the press, when it is in their own hands, but, when turned against their own sacred persons, as loud in its reprehension.

Lawless, of course, produced the six millions of enslaved loyalists in Ireland-the number is always on the move forward-and the atrocities of the disloyal Orange faction. It may be safely conceded to such arguers, that the Roman Catholic population is the majority in Ireland ;—but how is that majority composed ?-Precisely of the most ignorant, benighted, savage, and brutal peasantry in the world. In intellect, in education, in everything which marks the civilized being, the Protestants are ten to one, as they are

fifty to one in wealth and prosperity. Lawless well knows that no legislative enactment at least no legislative enactment in the contemplation of the party he was addressing-could reach the millions about whom he was sputtering. An important change must take place in the frame of Irish society before anything can be done which will raise them to the level of a civilized population; and that change will not be effected by putting down the Protestant Church, and substituting the Roman Catholic in its room, as his friends are fondly hoping. That would indeed be a sad retrograde movement. Do not think I am too harsh in the character I am giving of the Irish peasantry. They are at present, in the south of Ireland, (where they are exclusively Roman Catholics, the north, which is tinged with the much abused colour of orange, being quiet,) engaged in a system of assassination and arson, which would disgrace the Cherokees. It is scarcely a month since a Mr Franks was shot in his own parlour, the skull of his wife shattered by a crowbar while she clung to the arms of her son, the head of the son smashed to pieces by the same instrument, and his body pierced by a pitch-fork, which was passed from hand to hand between nearly a hundred peasants, in order that each might participate in insulting the lifeless body, while a fellow, who was left outside as guard, whistled and danced a hornpipe for joy. The crime this family was guilty of was this-the son had been evidence in a criminal prosecution against a man convicted of extorting fire arms, to be employed in carrying on the system which produces these results. Such are the millions for whose ascendancy Mr Lawless is preaching. It is only insulting our understandings to appeal to this numerical argument. Let the question of Roman Catholic emancipation be argued on its own merits. If it be unjust to keep Roman Catholics from power, it is no matter whether the injustice affect a thousand or a million; it should not disgrace our

statute-book for a moment in either case. If it be necessary to keep them cut, their numbers are nothing at all to the justice of the business-it is only an argument to expediency, or, in other words, to our fears-an argument, Christopher, which we have at all times, through good report and evil, treated with the bitterness of scorn, by whomsoever, or in whatsoever cause, it may be advanced. As for the Orangemen, he must be wilfully blind who does not see that they are forced into union by fear. Nobody likes domici liary visits from gentlemen furnished with sledge-hammers to extract his brains. The very secrecy of their meetings-the mere fact of their having private signs and symbols to know one another by-is a proof of their being apprehensive, not of their being domineering. Their atrocities are confined to putting tawdry ribbons, in most vile bad taste, upon a paltry statue-(a piece of tom-foolery always disapproved of by their leaders, Sir Abraham Bradley King for instance,* after it was made matter of offence, and now given up)-and toasting the memory of William III. That this toast should excite Whig indignation, is strange; and stranger still, that the Orangemen should be accused of insulting intrusion on the feelings of their countrymen, when they themselves are to be refused the poor privilege of giving as a toast the memory of him who may justly be deemed the founder of the dynasty now occupying the throne. What would the Whigs say, if the Whig Clubs were prohibited from giving the memory of Charles James Fox, because, though acceptable to them, it stinks in the nostrils of all the honest men in the kingdom? Then indeed would we have the nose of Brougham twitched in tenfold fury, in defiance of us and all our works.

Observe, I am not giving any opinion whatever as to the expediency, or inexpediency of Orange Associa tions. I am too far from the spot, and the accounts from Ireland are too contradictory, and too fierce, for me to

hazard any very decisive assertion on their credit. But one argument against them I know to be fallacious. It is said that they are useless, and not required in England or Scotland, and therefore not in Ireland. Negatur conclusio. I deny the ergo. The state of society here is not like that in the sister island. God forbid it should. We have our angry politics, to be sure, but are not living in the middle of a Jacqueric, in spite of the exertions of Hunt, Watson, or the late Queen and her advocates, to get up one. What, therefore, may be altogether unnecessary here, may be called for in Ireland. Even if useless there also, we may easily pardon those, who, seeing their friends massacred unprotectedly all round them, adopt means of drawing together people to oppose such operations. Denman, at this dinner, was quite absurd in his remarks on the Irish Insurrection Act. It is very easy for a gentleman, strongly entrenched over a bowl of cold punch, or a bottle of claret, in a quiet orderly city, among a knot of people, who, though Whigs, are in a great degree civilized, to talk about the severities of a law imperiously required; but if Mr Denman will take a house in Kildorrery, or thereabouts, and have the audacity to expect rents for his ground, he will, before the moon has changed, alter his opinion, and call lustily for any enactment that will keep the house over his head. I should be sorry indeed that such laws were put in force among our quiet hills on the Border; but there is a very different order of things going on in Duhallow.

Nor am I giving my opinion against Roman Catholic emancipation. I hope and trust the time will come, when the privileges and immunities of the state will be open to all; but I hope and trust also, that those privileges and immunities will never be opened to any one who will make use of them to wage war on the glorious institutions of the country. If we could be satisfied that the Roman Catholic priesthood would be content to remain in obedience to the laws of the land-to submit, as every other sectarian body submits, to the paramount authority of the Established Church, and make no efforts to put themselves up as the

dominant religion of any part of the kingdom, I am quite sure there would not be a word against what is modestly called Catholic claims, spoken by one of us in or out of Parliament. No man of common sense could imagine that a general would betray his duty, because he believed in the infallibility of the Pope, or any other old woman;. or that a judge would violate the laws he was administering, for the same reason; and as for Parliament, you know, North, what my opinion always has been on that point. I never feared the efforts of any demagogue fellow within those walls. I sincerely rejoiced in the election of Waithman, for instance, for I knew the Midas ears, which were taken by the jobbernowled corporators for horns of offence, powerful as those of the bulls of Bashan to batter down borough-mongery, would be found out in half an hour, when brought into company with the flower of England's gentlemen; and, accordingly, it was soon discovered, that he was, as Cobbett called him, a water bladder, from which nothing could come, because nothing was in it. So would it be with O'Connell and his compeers. A sentence from Canning would dispose of the first dozen of them for life. Tragedy-man Shiel would sit down in happy obscurity with Comedy-man Twiss. Fingals and Frenches, and the other sage nobility, would range with the Albemarles, the Nugents, and the rest of the rubbish of the House of Lords. It always makes me laugh when I think of such people sitting in the same house with Eldon, or Stowell, or Liverpool, or Wellington; ay, or even the remains of Erskine,* dilapidated as they are. But I fear that these concessions would only pave the way to the demand of Roman Catholic ascendancy in Ireland. I know it is an object earnestly desired by some of their velvet-pawed, petitioners to Parliament. Look, for example, at the amazing insolence of the language addressed daily by priestlings in Ireland, to that great theologian, and most exemplary man, the Archbishop of Dublin, and you cannot doubt the fact. And if we admit the arguments now relied on to be valid, we cannot resist it. If the simple fact, that a barbarous people outnumbers the intellect of Ireland, be