Islands have not taken from England, for ages and ages, one single penny in the way of tax; that while millions on millions have been squandered on the worthless colonies of North America, the West India colonies have not only maintained their own internal government, and paid the troops stationed there, but have been loaded with enormous charges in the shape of pensions and sinecures to the aristocracy of England. * * * The blacks may be Mr. Prentice's brethren for anything I know or care; but the West India proprietors and occupiers are the brethren of Englishmen; and Englishmen have stood by and seen them taxed without mercy, but have never paid one farthing of tax for them."
Although the reiterated statement that the sum of £3,800,000. a-year was drained from the people of this country for the support of our slave colonies, remained uncontradicted, some of the persons in Manchester who called themselves Mr. Cobbett's friends, in August, 1832, placarded the town with his article of 1828, containing the charges of "malignant falsehood" and "worse than brutal ignorance;" and it was the policy of those persons to raise a prejudice against many of its inhabitants, who had laboured earnestly for the improvement of the poor at home, that they wished to waste people's sympathies on distant objects. While these injudicious adherents were thus giving currency to the abuse which he, in his indiscretion, lavished upon benevolent men, and adding to it all manner of vituperation upon the advocates for negro freedom, thinking that thus they were giving the best evidence of their zeal for the cause of their leader, he himself had been gradually opening his eyes to the gross iniquity of holding even "black men" in bondage, and to the fact that "slavery was made use of as the means of keeping us in slavery;" and he had plumply declared that it was no longer the question now whether we should abandon the West India Islands altogether, or uphold
