Do not displease the legislatures of the West India islands.

It is by them that those laws must be passed, and enforced, which will secure your object." Now he was directly at issue with these gentlemen.

He could show, that the abolition was the only certain mode of amending the treatment of the slaves, so as to secure their increase; and that the mode which had been offered to him, was at once inefficacious and unsafe.

In the first place, how could any laws, made by these legislatures, be effectual, whilst the evidence of Negros was in no case admitted against White men?
What was the answer from Grenada?
Did it not state, "that they who were capable of cruelty, would in general be artful enough to prevent any but slaves from being witnesses of the fact ?" Hence it had arisen, that when positive laws had been made, in some of the islands, for the protection of the slaves, they had been found almost a dead letter.
Besides, by what law would you enter into every man's domestic concerns, and regulate the interior economy of his house and plantation?
This would be something more than a general excise.

Who would endure such a law?
And yet on all these and innumerable other minutiae must depend the protection of the slaves, their comforts, and the probability of their increase.