LECTURE XI

Summary

The diminution in the numbers of the native inhabitants of the Spanish colonies in America drove the conquerors, in little more than half a century after its first discovery, to resort to the importation of negro slaves to supply the deficiency. For three centuries, from that time to the present, every year has witnessed the arrival of fresh cargoes of these doomed children of servitude on the shores of the Western continent and its islands; destined in part to replace the waste which excessive toil and unnatural restrictions continually make in their numbers, in part to accelerate the multiplication of the black and coloured races in that hemisphere, which seems likely either to balance or to outweigh the influence of the white and civilised race over great part of its surface. The difficult and intricate character of the questions involved in this fatal subject of slavery—the very wide extent of the interests embraced by it—the feeling of reluctance, and almost abhorrence, with which the mind approaches the mere economical consideration of matters so deeply interesting to every social and moral feeling of our nature,—all these render it extremely difficult for me to enter on it at all, and make it almost a bewildering endeavour to compress the treatment of it within the compass of a lecture. I must content myself with bringing its features very generally, I fear very indistinctly, before your view; and what space we have for more minute investigation must be devoted to what is of the most immediate interest at present to ourselves—the economical condition of those colonies in which slavery has been recently abrogated.