286
PLANTERS AND SLAVES.
the mode, we shall not only fail ourselves but make it impossible that any should succeed. I do not expect to move the convictions of those who measure the improvement of the colonies by the reports of a Methodist missionary, and I am quite hopeless of those whose sole concern it seems to be to make a speech at the Freemasons' Tavern, and who can put up with the admiration which issues from between fans and reticules. But there is, I trust, a large though more silent body of wise men, who are neither Methodists nor Abolitionists, who get up no reports and make no speeches, but as Englishmen, of no party but that of England, will keep an anxious and a patient eye on a vast though remote branch of the empire, and will not surfer the just rights of white or black to be destroyed by the ignorance or the wickedness of faction. This body is the people, and their voice will be heard through everything, and must be obeyed in spite of everything. It is the voice of a monarch. But let not the colonists imagine because there has been a natural reaction against the puerilities of the African Institution, that therefore the
pleaded cause of the planters is sheerly triumphant in England;.they should know that
the excesses of Macqueen are as justly reprobated as those of Stephen, and that neither pieces of plate, nor slaughtered men of straw, nor even grants of money, can divert the serious gaze of enlightened philanthropy from the very