MR. BORTHWICK'S LECTURE.

On Wednesday evening, at the same hour, the Amphitheatre was again crowded with a numerous assemblage to hear the reply of Mr. Borthwick, the agent of the West Indian body in this country.

Mr. ADAM HODGSON was again called to the chair, and after a neat and appropriate address, expressed a hope that the same order and decorum which had characterized the proceedings of the first night's discussion, would be exhibited on the present occasion.

Mr. BORTHWICK then stood forward and said, that the gentleman who lectured on the preceding evening was the agent of the Anti-Slavery Society, a body of men whose object was to obtain what they called immediate emancipation, but which, after all, they defined not to be immediate emancipation, but the substitution of what they called responsible and public authority, for private and irresponsible authority. It was his object to show that, in the first sense, immediate emancipation was not attainable in the present state of things; and as for the second sense, that did not seem to him to posses any determined or definite meaning. He had sufficient experience of Mr. Thompson as a lecturer to know that that gentlemen would not be satisfied if he merely attacked principles, and thus overthrew, or attempted to overthrow, the arguments founded upon them, unless he also went through every individual argument or illustration, and overthrew that also. This would be his (Mr. B.'s) object to do in the first instance, and, in the second place, to introduce a few arguments, totally unconnected with last night's lecture, in order to show the impracticability, the danger, the immorality, and the sin of any attempt immediately to emancipate, unconditionally, the slave of the West Indian colonies. Before doing so, he must congratulate himself, Mr. Thompson, and the cause, on the very different tone which Mr. Thompson had now assumed. Mr. Thompson did not now, as he did at Manchester, tell them that the West

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Indian merchants were inhuman or wholesale butchers,that those who came forward in defence of the West Indian body were fools uttering what they knew to be falsehoods, and he congratulated Mr. Thompson on this desirable consumation. Mr. Thompson had enumerated no fewer than twenty-six evils as arising from the system of slavery-many of those twenty six-evils he had barely asserted without advancing any thing in the shape of proof, and, therefore, it was not without reason, he observed, that the gentleman who followed him would be obliged to have recourse to a sort of rail-road travelling, which, however new it might be in logic, would be absolutely necessary to follow Mr. Thompson in the course which he had adopted. He agreed with Mr. Thompson that it was a matter of perfect indifference to the question at issue, who were the parties to whom the guilt of first setting on foot the slave trade was attributed-but he was prepared to show that the planters were not the persons to whom the guilt was chargeable. The first evil, which, according to Mr. Thompson, was to be found on the threshold of slavery, was that it cursed with sterility the land where it existed; but did not the same sterility prevail wherever there was excessive cultivation of the land,-even where there were no slaves, and if it did, how could sterility, arising from such a cause, be deemed one of the special and peculiar characteristics of slavery? (Applause.) He recommended the gentlemen to include this head in a lecture on the evils of excessive agriculture,—not in one on the evils of slavery. (Laughter and applause.) The second evil was, that slavery gave rise to the slave trade;-that was a most extraordinary mode of putting the cart before the horse indeed. For twenty-five years no slave had been brought into the colonies, and how could it be said that slavery necessarily produced and fostered the slave trade? (Applause.) The third evil alleged was, that slavery doomed the infant to the same condition as its father, that was, it made the child a slave because its father and mother were slaves too. But was there any thing peculiar to slavery in that? Did it not universally happen that the child was born to the condition of its father? (Much hissing and applause.) [The Chairman earnestly desired a patient and uninterrupted hearing for the speaker.] It

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was true that children endowed by heaven with greater talents, frequently raised themselves to a height which their fathers never knew; he might mention an Eldon and a Brougham, and many others in illustration, and he was prepared to prove that this might be the case, and had been the case even in a slave country. (Hear, hear.) the colonies, the infant negro was born to the condition of a slave, just as the infant of a peasant, a king, or a lord, was born to the condition of a peasant, a king, or a lord, in other countries; but being born in any of those conditions, he was not necessarily confined to one. The gentleman had drawn a comparison between the present condition of the slaves he sought to emancipate, and the condition of the Jews under their Egyptian bondage, alleging that the same selfish motive which influenced Pharaoh induced the West Indian colonists to retain their slaves in bondage. There was no possible analogy between the cases. The Jews had gone into Egypt at the special invitation of the government, and resided there under its special protection and did Pharaoh keep them there because he wanted more bricks? No; but because he was afraid that the Jews would become a mighty people, stronger than himself. Pharaoh resisted an express command of the Almighty to let them depart to worship God in the wilderness, and therefore he and his people perished in the Red Sea. Were the slaves in the West Indian colonies over-worked as the Jews were over wrought by Pharaoh, or treated in the same unjust manner as the Jews? He should show, before he concluded, that they were not, and, therefore, he contended that there was no resemblance between them and the Jews. For twenty-five years, the religious, moral, and physical improvement of the negroes had been proceeding, and that by the exclusive agency of the planters themselves; he would undertake to show that the slaves were gradually approaching to the condition of freemen, and that, by and by, if the good cause were not impeded by some such cumbrous help as that tendered by the Anti-Slavery Society,-(laughter, disapprobation and applause,)—if it were not so impeded, the good work which every religious and humane man wished to see,-freedom for the slave, with security to the master, would soon be accomplished. (Applause.)

What was the meaning of the passages of Scripture which had been quoted? What did St. Paul mean when he told those who had been newly converted to Christianity, to remember those who were in bondage as if they were bound with them? Simply that being one in hope and faith with those who were suffering all imaginary cruelties,― liable to be torn to pieces by wild beasts, they ought to feel and do for those fellow Christians, what they would expect to be done for themselves under the like circumstances. That was the simple and literal meaning of the passage, however it might suit Mr. Thompson to use it, ad captandum, on the other side of question. (Hear, hear.) But again, remember those that are in bonds as if you were bound with them were the slaves, in any sense, in bonds? The people of England were told that the negroes were absolutely worked in chains, but that was only the case with convicts, and the same thing might be seen in England, with the difference, however, that the chains of the negro convict were not half so heavy as those worn by free Englishmen. (Applause.) The fourth evil of West Indian slavery was said to be that it oppressed the body with more labor than any other system without affording the ordinary motives to labor; he contended that even according to Mr. Thompson's showing, the slave had double motives to labor, for he also had a wife and child, and it was but natural that he should exert himself early and late to accumulate wealth, in order that he might purchase their freedom. The fourth evil, therefore, seemed almost to be a positive good. Were there no instances in which masters had given freedom to slaves in requital for their zealous and faithful services? Mr. Borthwick then related an anecdote told him by a gentleman who had resided twelve years in Jamaica,-to the effect that a negro came to him with the plan of an estate of forty or fifty acres, which the negro was about to purchase, in order that he might place his wife and child upon it, he himself determining, however, to remain a slave, because as he alleged, he was better provided for as a slave than he would be if he was free. (Loud laughter and applause.) The fifth and sixth evils attributed to slavery all imagi nary sufferings-poverty, nakedness, imprisonment, and he knew not what all; no proof had yet been attempted ;

but if it were proved, he was prepared to show that the same, if not a greater degree of distress and imprisonment, existed in every county of free and happy England. (Applause.) But when he has proved this, would the proof be any argument for a sudden change in the whole frame work of English society, in the face of that maxim of the soundest political writers, that it was better to endure even an evil than to exchange it suddenly for good? (Hisses and applause.) The maxim was none of his; it was that of Paley, and of all the soundest political writers. What would be the consequences of immediate emancipation to the slaves themselves? Two thirds of them were individuals not able to work, either on account of sickness, infancy, or old age; their owners were now compelled by law to provide for them, and it would be a strange mode of improving their condition to turn them out with no such dependance. (Applause.) In England there were poor laws and workhouses, yet the poor often perished for want in the streets; but did any one ever hear of such an occurrence amongst the slaves in the West Indies? (Cries of Never, never,' and much applause.) The seventh evil was, that human beings might be mortgaged to moneylenders, meaning, he supposed, that separation of families of which they were told so much. He admitted that it was an evil, the only one out of the seven that had been enumerated, that families might be seized by law, separated, and sold to pay the debts of their master. (Hear, hear.) This did occasion great pain in the negro families, but he had shown that in the other six instances the negro had the advantage over the peasant in this country, and that was sufficient to counterbalance the evils in their comparative conditions. (Much disapprobation and applause.) The peasant incurred many more chances of imprisonment, than the negro of changing masters without his own choice, a circumstance which hardly ever happened, though he admitted it was possible. (A person in the pit here exclaimed, with great unction and emphasis, 'Beelzebub.') The eighth evil was the alleged decrease of the slave population. Now, what were the facts? Be it remembered that the colonies were peopled from Africa, by avaricious men, according to Mr. Thompson, and the more avaricious they were, the worse for Mr. Thompson's