Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches - Volume 4 by Thomas Badington Macaulay (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

my power to show strong reasons for believing that the moral obligation pleaded by the Ministers has no existence. If there be no such moral obligation, then, as it is conceded on the other side that all fiscal and commercial arguments are on the side of my noble friend, it follows that we ought to adopt his amendment.

The right honourable gentleman, the late President of the Board of Trade, has said that the Government does not pretend to act with perfect consistency as to this distinction between free labour and slave labour. It was, indeed, necessary that he should say this; for the policy of the Government is obviously most inconsistent. Perfect consistency, I admit, we are not to expect in human affairs. But, surely, there is a decent consistency which ought to be observed; and of this the right honourable gentleman himself seems to be sensible; for he asks how, if we admit sugar grown by Brazilian slaves, we can with decency continue to stop Brazilian vessels engaged in the slave trade. This argument, whatever be its value, proceeds on the very correct supposition that the test of sincerity in individuals, in parties, and in governments, is consistency. The right honourable gentleman feels, as we must all feel, that it is impossible to give credit for good faith to a man who on one occasion pleads a scruple of conscience as an excuse for not doing a certain thing, and who on other occasions, where there is no essential difference of circumstances, does that very thing without any scruple at all. I do not wish to use such a word as hypocrisy, or to impute that odious vice to any gentleman on either side of the House. But whoever declares one moment that he feels himself bound by a certain moral rule, and the next moment, in a case strictly similar, acts in direct defiance of that rule, must submit to have, if not his honesty, yet at least his power of discriminating right from wrong very gravely questioned.

Now, Sir, I deny the existence of the moral obligation pleaded by the Government. I deny that we are under any moral obligation to turn our fiscal code into a penal code, for the purpose of correcting vices in the institutions of independent states. I say that, if you suppose such a moral obligation to be in force, the supposition leads to consequences from which every one of us would recoil, to consequences which would throw the whole commercial and political system of the world into confusion. I say that, if such a moral obligation exists, our financial legislation is one mass of injustice and inhumanity. And I say more especially that, if such a moral obligation exists, the right honourable Baronet's Budget is one mass of injustice and inhumanity.

Observe, I am not disputing the paramount authority of moral obligation. I am not setting up pecuniary considerations against moral considerations. I know that it would be not only a wicked but a shortsighted policy, to aim at making a nation like this great and prosperous by violating the laws of justice. To those laws, enjoin what they may, I am prepared to submit. But I will not palter with them: I will not cite them to-day in order to serve one turn, and quibble them away to-morrow in order to serve another. I will not have two standards of right; one to be applied when I wish to protect a favourite interest at the public cost; and another to be applied when I wish to replenish the Exchequer, and to give an impulse to trade. I will not have two weights or two measures. I will not blow hot and cold, play fast and loose, strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. Can the Government say as much? Are gentlemen opposite prepared to act in conformity with their own principle? They need not look long for opportunities. The Statute Book swarms with enactments directly opposed to the rule which they profess to respect. I will take a single instance from our existing laws, and propound it to the gentlemen opposite as a test, if I must not say of their sincerity, yet of their power of moral discrimination. Take the article of tobacco. Not only do you admit the tobacco of the United States which is grown by slaves; not only do you admit the tobacco of Cuba which is grown by slaves, and by slaves, as you tell us, recently imported from Africa; but you actually interdict the free labourer of the United Kingdom from growing tobacco. You have long had in your Statute Book laws prohibiting the cultivation of tobacco in England, and authorising the Government to destroy all tobacco plantations except a few square yards, which are suffered to exist unmolested in botanical gardens, for purposes of science. These laws did not extend to Ireland. The free peasantry of Ireland began to grow tobacco. The cultivation spread fast. Down came your legislation upon it; and now, if the Irish freeman dares to engage in competition with the slaves of Virginia and Havannah, you exchequer him; you ruin him; you grub up his plantation. Here, then, we have a test by which we may try the consistency of the gentlemen opposite. I ask you, are you prepared, I do not say to exclude the slave grown tobacco, but to take away from slave grown tobacco the monopoly which you now give to it, and to permit the free labourer of the United Kingdom to enter into competition on equal terms, on any terms, with the negro who works under the lash? I am confident that the three right honourable gentleman opposite, the First Lord of the Treasury, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the late President of the Board of Trade, will all with one voice answer "No." And why not? "Because," say they, "it will injure the revenue. True it is," they will say, "that the tobacco imported from abroad is grown by slaves, and by slaves many of whom have been recently carried across the Atlantic in defiance, not only of justice and humanity, but of law and treaty. True it is that the cultivators of the United Kingdom are freemen. But then on the imported tobacco we are able to raise at the Custom House a duty of six hundred per cent., sometimes indeed of twelve hundred per cent.: and, if tobacco were grown here, it would be difficult to get an excise duty of even a hundred per cent. We cannot submit to this loss of revenue; and therefore we must give a monopoly to the slaveholder, and make it penal in the freeman to evade that monopoly." You may be right; but, in the name of common sense, be consistent. If this moral obligation of which you talk so much be one which may with propriety yield to fiscal considerations, let us have Brazilian sugars. If it be paramount to all fiscal considerations, let us at least have British snuff and cigars.

The present Ministers may indeed plead that they are not the authors of the laws which prohibit the cultivation of tobacco in Great Britain and Ireland. That is true. The present Government found those laws in existence: and no doubt there is good sense in the Conservative doctrine that many things which ought not to have been set up ought not, when they have been set up, to be hastily and rudely pulled down. But what will the right honourable Baronet urge in vindication of his own new budget? He is not content with maintaining laws which he finds already existing in favour of produce grown by slaves. He introduces a crowd of new laws to the same effect. He comes down to the House with a proposition for entirely taking away the duties on the importation of raw cotton. He glories in this scheme. He tells us that it is in strict accordance with the soundest principles of legislation. He tells us that it will be a blessing to the country. I agree with him, and I intend to vote with him. But how is all this cotton grown? Is it not grown by slaves? Again I say, you may be right; but, in the name of common sense, be consistent. I saw, with no small amusement, a few days ago, a paragraph by one of the right honourable Baronet's eulogists, which was to the following effect:-"Thus has this eminent statesman given to the English labourer a large supply of a most important raw material, and has manfully withstood those ravenous Whigs who wished to inundate our country with sugar dyed in negro blood." With what I should like to know, is the right honourable Baronet's cotton dyed?

Formerly, indeed, an attempt was made to distinguish between the cultivation of cotton and the cultivation of sugar. The cultivation of sugar, it was said, was peculiarly fatal to the health and life of the slave. But that plea, whatever it may have been worth, must now be abandoned; for the right honourable Baronet now proposes to reduce, to a very great extent, the duty on slave grown sugar imported from the United States.

Then a new distinction is set up. The United States, it is said, have slavery; but they have no slave trade. I deny that assertion. I say that the sugar and cotton of the United States are the fruits, not only of slavery, but of the slave trade. And I say further that, if there be on the surface of this earth a country which, before God and man, is more accountable than any other for the misery and degradation of the African race, that country is not Brazil, the produce of which the right honourable Baronet excludes, but the United States, the produce of which he proposes to admit on more favourable terms than ever. I have no pleasure in going into an argument of this nature. I do not conceive that it is the duty of a member of the English Parliament to discuss abuses which exist in other societies. Such discussion seldom tends to produce any reform of such abuses, and has a direct tendency to wound national pride, and to inflame national animosities. I would willingly avoid this subject; but the right honourable Baronet leaves me no choice. He turns this House into a Court of Judicature for the purpose of criticising and comparing the institutions of independent States. He tells us that our Tariff is to be made an instrument for rewarding the justice and humanity of some Foreign Governments, and for punishing the barbarity of others. He binds up the dearest interests of my constituents with questions with which otherwise I should, as a Member of Parliament, have nothing to do. I would gladly keep silence on such questions. But it cannot be. The tradesmen and the professional men whom I represent say to me, "Why are we to be loaded, certainly for some years, probably for ever, with a tax, admitted by those who impose it to be grievous, unequal, inquisitorial? Why are we to be loaded in time of peace with burdens heretofore reserved for the exigencies of war?" The paper manufacturer, the soap manufacturer, say, "Why, if the Income Tax is to be continued, are our important and suffering branches of industry to have no relief?" And the answer is, "Because Brazil does not behave so