of them put his arm through one of the windows, took a lighted candle from off the table, and endeavoured with it to set fire to the bed-room. Mrs. Baylis prevented this by putting out the light ere any of the furniture in the room had ignited.

"After this these murderous members of this church-destroying society demolished the windows in the house, swearing that the house should be destroyed that night, while some of them broke open the stores, calling aloud for fire to burn them, but in this they were defeated.

"I went unarmed to the door and remonstrated with them, when some appeared ashamed of their conduct, but others grew more violent. By this time an alarm was sounded in the neighbourhood, when the wretches made a precipitate retreat. Though we are in a part of the country not thickly inhabited, soon more than three hundred persons, coloured and black, ran to our assistance, and, had not these midnight marauders made off on their horses, the death they had intended for us would have doubtless been their lot.

"The coloured and black population around us are now on the alert, and under their protection we feel ourselves comparatively safe, and are highly thankful to that Divine Being who so mercifully preserved us when exposed to imminent danger."

7. Delegates appointed by the Assembly of Jamaica.

It appears from the Royal Gazette of Jamaica, of the 28th April, 1832, that the House of Assembly had adopted resolutions to the following effect:

"1. That the very alarming and ruinous state of the island calls upon the representatives of the unjustly calumniated and deeply oppressed inhabitants thereof, to adopt some measure that is likely to obtain substantial justice and permanent relief against the undeserved calamities they now endure, and are further threatened with.

"2.-That the appointment of a Committee from among the representatives of the people, to proceed to Great Britain for the purpose of laying their grievances at the foot of the Throne for redress, is a measure likely to be beneficial to the best interests of the colony.

"3.-That the Hon. Richard Barrett, Speaker, and Hon. Abraham Hodgson, members of this House, be, and are appointed, a Committee from this island, and that they do embark for Great Britain at their earliest convenience, so as to be in time to meet the next Session of the Imperial Parliament.

"4. That this House will defray the expenses of the members composing the Committee appointed to proceed to Great Britain, and that the Receiver-General be directed to pay to each of the members thereof the sum of £1000 sterling, free of premium, previous to embarking for Great Britain, on account of such expenses.

"5. That it be recommended to the House to appoint a Committee to bring in a bill to authorize the Governor, or LieutenantGovernor, for the time being, to grant leave of absence to the Hon.

Richard Barrett, as Assistant Judge of the Supreme Court, to proceed to England without prejudice to his seniority.

"6.-That this House grant leave of absence to their Speaker, the Hon. Richard Barrett, and to the Hon. Abraham Hodgson, to visit England, to lay their grievances at the foot of the Throne.

7.-That this House will elect a Speaker pro tempore (if necessary) during the absence of the Hon. Richard Barrett, their Speaker.

8. Trial of the Editor of the Jamaica Watchman for a Cupital Felony.

There is an act of the legislature of Jamaica which declares that, "if any person shall maliciously and advisedly endeavour to excite, or stir up, any free person or slave to commit any act of insurrection or rebellion, he shall be deemed and adjudged to be guilty of felony, and shall suffer death, without benefit of clergy."

Under this act Mr. Jordon, the Editor of the Watchman, was on the 17th of April last tried capitally, for having, in his paper of the 7th of the same month, used the following language:-"Now that the member of Westmoreland (Mr. Beaumont) is on our side, we shall be happy, with him and the other friends of humanity, to give a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull altogether, until we bring down the system by the run, knock off the fetters, and let the oppressed go free."

He seems to have been saved from the martyrdom intended for him, as the enemy of slavery and the friend of missions and missionaries, only by a failure in the proof of editorship on the day laid in the indictment.

II. REBELLION IN JAMAICA.

In our No. 94 we took a review of the exciting causes of the late commotion in Jamaica, and we traced its origin, as we conceive, not to the rebellious spirit of the slaves, but to the rashness, and imprudence, and impetuosity of the white community, who seem actually to have driven the slaves into insubordination and resistance. This conclusion seems to us to be confirmed by papers since laid before Parliament. Among these, in a document printed by order of the House of Commons on the 16th March, 1832, numbered 285, is a Despatch of the 1st of March, 1832, which Lord Goderich addressed to the Earl of Belmore in reply to the details of the insurrection contained in his despatch of the 6th of January preceding; the following are extracts from it :

"The proximate cause of the commotions in the parishes of St. James and Trelawny, in the months of December and January last, is considered by your Lordship to have been the prevalency, amongst the slaves in those parishes, of the opinion that some law had been enacted in this kingdom for their general and immediate emancipation, which their owners had studiously concealed and unanimously disobeyed; and to the general adoption by the slaves of the further opinion that, in asserting their liberty by force, they were secure against the hostility of his Majesty's naval and military forces, if indeed they could not reasonably calculate on their assistance and co-operation. These misconceptions

your Lordship traces to the various public discussions on the subject of slavery by which the Colony had been agitated. In considering the view which you have thus taken of the subject I have been led to cast a retrospect over the events of the last nine years, so eventful in the history of the British WestIndies."

His Lordship having then adverted to the various assurances given by Lord Belmore in his despatches, during the course of 1831, of the tranquillity prevailing among the slaves, and of the unusual excitement existing among the planters, of which we have already given some account (No. 94, p. 94-98, and p. 108), thus proceeds:

"However little the slaves may in general be capable of reading, or have the opportunity to read the public newspapers, yet it would be irrational to doubt that rumours must circulate amongst them of the progress of a debate in which they are so deeply interested, and that they must form many strange and exaggerated conceptions of facts which are at once so often impressed and so discoloured by the prejudices and passions of those who undertake to relate them. From the various documents which accompany your Lordship's despatch it may, with sufficient distinctness, be collected that, towards the end of the last year, there prevailed generally amongst the slaves in St. James's and Trelawny the opinion to which I have already referred, that a law had passed for their emancipation which their owners had suppressed and disobeyed; and that, in asserting their freedom, the slaves might calculate upon the neutrality, if not upon the assistance, of the king's naval and military forces. I further find that the existence of these misconceptions, known as they were to the resident magistracy and proprietors, was not communicated to your Lordship, although your instructions to the Custodes, of the month of July, had anxiously enjoined those officers to convey to you any such intelligence; and, lastly, it is but too evident that no effort was made by them to dispel the delusions under which the slaves were thus known to be labouring.

"In confirmation of these statements I especially refer to Sir Willoughby Cotton's despatch of the 5th of January, in which he observes that the overseers, or attorneys, or magistrates, should not have acquainted the Executive Government with the extent to which the determination of the Negroes had gone, all round their district, not to work after New-Year's Day without being made free, is most astonishing, as it would appear to have been known on almost all the estates that these were the sentiments of the Negroes.' Mr. M'Donald, the Custos of Trelawny, in his despatch of the 4th of January, says, If other gentlemen had acted with the same kindness, and taken the same pains to explain the real nature of things as I have done, I do not think that this unfortunate insurrection would have been so general.'

"Again, in his despatch of the 3rd January, Sir W. Cotton informed your Lordship that the whole of the men shot yesterday stated that they had been told by white people, for a long time past, that they were to be free at Christmas, and that the freedom order had actually come out from England, but was withheld.

"Similar statements abound in the documents before me. Yet it now appears that, until the 22nd December, your Lordship had been left in such entire ignorance of those facts, that, at that late period, you, for the first time, thought it necessary to publish his Majesty's proclamation, and in the very letter transmitting it to the Custodes you referred to insubordination as existing only on a single estate, and to the uninterrupted tranquillity which had hitherto prevailed throughout the island.'

"I have entered thus at length into these details because they appear to me most important in affording a solution of the causes to which, in part at least, must be attributed the calamitous events which followed. After exhortations

repeated by his Majesty's Government for more than eight successive years, without effect; after such public meetings as I have mentioned in every part of the island; after the circulation of the resolutions and public journals already noticed; after the convention of a body of delegates at the capital; and after secret debates in the House of Assembly, followed by the rejection of the measures proposed there for the benefit of the slaves, it must have become to every reflecting man sufficiently evident that the peace of the island was placed in extreme jeopardy, and that the slaves could scarcely escape the infection of those opinions which they appear to have adopted. How fraught with danger to the public safety was the prevalence of such opinions among a people so ignorant and so easily excited it were superfluous to remark. Induced, as they had been, to suppose that the royal authority was opposed in their favour to that of their owners, and that designs were entertained by the king's government which the colonial magistracy and proprietors intended to counteract by force, the sense of supposed injustice, combining with a plausible expectation of impunity in resisting it, could scarcely fail to urge them to acts of open rebellion. That under such circumstances the proprietors should, in your Lordship's forcible terms, have been heedless of the brink of danger on which they stood;' that, as the Custos of Trelawny remarks, 'they should not have taken pains to explain the real nature of things' to the slaves, and that, regardless of your Lordship's repeated admonitions, they should have left you in ignorance of the prevalent state of opinion amongst that class of society, is, as Sir Willoughby Cotton justly observes, most astonishing.' It were wholly irrational to suppose that any single person in Jamaica, much more that any body of men, could be guilty of the incredible folly and wickedness of deliberately concealing the truth, either from the slaves under their charge or from the local government, with any settled design of bringing reproach on the measures of improvement so long in agitation. And I can ascribe the apathy which seems to have prevailed to nothing but the ordinary influence of those feelings which render men insensible to any risk, however formidable, with which habit has rendered them familiar."

It is impossible to deny the justice of these observations. They are in exact accordance with those which the notoriety of many of the facts on which they are founded must have led any man of common sense to make, on what had occurred in Jamaica. In one respect, however, we somewhat differ from his Lordship. We see no satisfactory proofs exhibited that, previous to Christmas, the slaves had entertained the idea of ceasing to labour on the plantations, however they might have been aware that the benevolent purposes of the Government towards them were met by determined resistance on the part of their masters; or that the planters knew, or were impressed with the belief, that the slaves had adopted any such idea. On the contrary, we can discover, neither in Lord Belmore's despatch, nor in any evidence we have yet seen, any proof which seems decisive, that up to that period such a notion of ceasing to labour had prevailed among the slaves generally, or that any such apprehensions were entertained by the planters. Not even a surmise to that effect appears to have transpired until the disturbance had commenced and was at its height. Then, indeed, we are told that such had been the previous intentions of the slaves; and that the existence of such intentions had been for some time universally known to the planters. But is this quite credible? Was it possible that in a community so constituted as that of Jamaica, at that time too in a state of pecu- . liar excitability, a dead and unbroken silence on this supremely inter

esting point, as if by common consent, should have prevailed among all its free population-that not one journal, even in the disturbed districts, should have alluded to the circumstance, or sounded the note of alarm? The total absence of all prudent reserve, in their ordinary communications, on which Lord Goderich so justly remarks, forbids our giving implicit credit to the unsupported statements of the planters, on which alone Sir Willoughby Cotton and Lord Belmore found their representations, and the whole of whose statements may have been, for any proof adduced to the contrary, a mere afterthought, intended to hide from public view the really proximate and inciting cause of the disturbance. The force of the previously-known and unquestionable facts of the case ought not to be invalidated merely by Sir W. Cotton's echo of the interested assertions of the planters of St. James's and Trelawny, or his report of unauthenticated confessions from some wretched slaves, when on the point of being hanged or shot without record, and without trial.

This conviction is scarcely weakened by the evidence attached to the Report of the Assembly inserted above, p. 235, and which has been printed by Order of the House of Commons (28 June, 1832, No. 561), but which did not reach our hands until the foregoing sheet had already been printed. Nothing can be conceived more utterly vague and unsatisfactory than that evidence. It actually proves nothing but the eager desire of the Committee of the Assembly to shift the blame of the insurrection from their own shoulders to the Government, the Missionaries, and the Saints. We should require nothing more than the perusal of that mass of absurdity, and mere hearsay gossip, to set that question at rest. And yet it is made the foundation, the only foundation, in the Report of the Committee adopted by the Assembly, for the very gravest charges, not only against his Majesty's Government and Parliament, but against the Anti-Slavery Society, the Baptists, the Wesleyan Methodists, and the Moravians. What may we not suppose to have been the kind of evidence which satisfied those Drum-head Courts Martial which have so unsparingly shed the blood of the Negroes on this occasion? If they proceeded on such or such like evidence, every execution must have been a MURDER.

But, it may be asked, was it not natural that the slaves should have been led to entertain such sentiments and intentions? We do not deny it. But still we think the evidence that they did entertain them, and above all that they were known by the planters to entertain them, is most unsatisfactorily established. That they were in a state of great excitement, produced by the causes specified by Lord Goderich, is highly probable; but we can find no sufficient proof that any plan had been formed by them of ceasing to labour on a particular day, or of resorting to acts of insubordination in order to assert their freedom. Of such a plan, or even of such an intention, no proof that is tangible appears to us to have hitherto been produced. On the contrary, nothing has appeared to show that if they had been left to the enjoyment of their usual Christmas holidays in the parish of St. James and Trelawny, and in those immediately adjoining, as there is reason to believe they were in the other parts of the Island, they