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0988

in this state it is a fixed fact among all classes that the negroes are free and that very few if any would have negro slavery again if they could get it. Yet we all deprecate the horrors of St. Domingo or the more recent scenes of Jamaica and would therefore proceed cautiously in our course toward the negro. For about thirty three years the negroes have been free in Jamaica, not merely emancipated but entirely free and enjoying all the rights and privileges of British subjects, yet very few have risen, mentally, above the low position they occupied whilst slaves, and the few who have made any advancement are only the exception to the general class, the great majority of them have found a lower level. The great error, I think, was not in not doing enough for the negro, [[in?]] that island, but in doing too much in the beginning and I dread the consequences to the poor negro, if we also do not profit in our treatment of him by the experience of the past. The present move to rush the negro up, to raise and elevate him as it is called, is made not with a due regard to what would be best for the negro, but with a view as to what will advance the designs of aspiring politicians, who generally have very little regard to the elevation of any body or anything but themselves. This is by far too great and important a question to be thrown into