ced in pregnancy, receive 160 lashes each. They were made to suffer the more, because one of them had requested that she might not be punished till after her delivery. Collars, with projecting spikes, and attached to each other by an iron chain, were afterwards fastened round their necks, &c."

The Reporter proceeds at great length with a list of what he calls judicial cruelties-one of the most atrocious of which-the case of the woman Nagle-I alluded to in my last, and shewed how horridly he had misrepresented the facts regarding it. Mark his disingenuity. In page 374, he says of the ordinances of 1723 and 1767, that "while they armed the master with absolute power over the slave, they afforded to the slave no effectual protection, scarcely even the shadow of protection, against its abuse;" and yet when he wants to blame the judges of partiality, he finds out that the laws were just and humane, for, in the case of the woman Nagle, he says they refused to avail themselves of a humane provision of the ordinance of 1723, which authorized them to resort to slave evidence, when white evidence could not be obtained, and when that of slaves was indispensable to the ends of justice!"

With regard to the punishment of the two pregnant females, the malignity with which it is related, is a proof of its falsehood; nor has the jackass of a Reporter condescended to shew us how the trees of "the woods" got a negro wench with child, who had been two years dwelling alone in them. With regard to the whip weighing 7 lbs., (I wonder old Mac did not make it 70 lbs. at once —it would just have been as readily

swallowed,) Mr Telfair tells us that he actually had one from thirty to forty feet long, which a waggoner, named William Wilberforce Hulme, had got from the Cape of Good Hope, to direct teams of oxen by its crack, but that this was the only purpose for which it was applied. Moreover, the hands of the negroes that had been mutilated, had not been so by their being put through the mill like sugar canes, but by the leprosy, and an epidemic disease called berri-berri!!

The unmanly charge levelled by this base writer against the free white females in the Mauritius, namely, that they hire their female slaves to the soldiers by the month for the purpose of prostitution, is a most infamous slander, and carries in the face of it its own refutation. The pay of a common soldier is barely sufficient for his absolute necessaries, and how then could he procure several dollars a-month to pay for prostitutes to gratify his passions? Such "Ladies" may be in the Mauritius, but they are no doubt of a description similar to those who, in London, under the Reporter's nose, let out their female slaves for prostitution, or such ladies perhaps as that anticolonial informer, GENERAL HALL, started in his secret rides in the Mauritius. Moreover, my Lord Duke, the charge is an infamous slander on the character and the discipline of the British army. If General Hall has given the Anti-slavery Reporter such information, I would ask him how he dared to disgrace himself as a general officer by permitting such proceedings, and further, if the officer who did so is fit to command a British soldier ?*

With regard to the punishments said to be inflicted on Bel Ombre, Mr Telfair minutely refutes each, and adds, "Of all the punishments on record at Bel Ombre, as far as I know, only one case occurred in which the offender received above twenty-five lashes, and they were inflicted by judicial order, and by the police officers." Speaking of education, he says, " far from neglecting education at Bel Ombre, it was the favourite employment of the family, who never missed the school hours, and who were accompanied in this pleasing avocation by visitors, either of the most respectable inhabitants of the Mauritius, or of the constant stream of travellers who considered this island as a house of call in their journey to and from India and the Cape of Good Hope. The blacks on my estates are regular in their attendance at church, and the Scriptures are explained to them every Sunday. Many, indeed most, of the respectable inhabitants are more like fathers than masters on

their estates. Their negroes repay them with a just fidelity and love. The habitation becomes, as I have often seen, an immense family, and the owner resembles a patriarch."

But let us draw the characters of the Anti-slavery Reporter's informants, and the contradiction to his infamous charges, from disinterested and unimpeachable pens.

COLONEL DRAPER, collector of customs of Port Louis, states, p. 184, "that the lower class of informers of the Antislavery Reporter, consists of drunken and discarded convict overseers, one of whom, by name Kendrick, deposed in England, that he witnessed an importation of slaves at Bel Ombre, on the very day when he was in prison at Port Louis as a gens-dearme, for bad conduct."-" The first informant," says COLONEL STAVELEY, de

puty quarter-master general, “is a man of the name of Higginson, whom I discharged from the department of roads for gross misconduct as an overseer. He had been in the habit of employing the convicts placed under his charge for the public service, in the cultivation of the habitation of a woman with whom he was living in a state of concubinage! He was accordingly dismissed. The other is named Kendrick. I met him in a state of filth and nakedness. He had formerly been an overseer in the convict depart

ment. He had been more than once discharged, and was finally dismissed for drunkenness. I found his character in that department to be bad. He subsequently entered, and was dismissed from, the Gen d'armerie, as a worthless vagabond." The Colonel gives Mr Telfair the highest character for humanity, and the "extreme attention paid to the comfort and religious instruction of the blacks" on his estates.

Such are the characters and the

witnesses on which the Anti-slavery Reporter has built and directed his gigantic fabric of falsehood and cruelty against Sir Robert Farquhar and Mr and Mrs Telfair. The enormity of the Reporter's guilt will, however, appear more conspicuous when it is shewn, that the falsehood of these statements was known to the Reporter and his associates, and that too from a most unquestionable source of information, several years before they published their catalogue of horrors. On the 24th November, 1820, Mr STEPHEN, upon the authority of some spies in the Mauritius, wrote his friend Judge Smith of that colony, censuring him, it would appear, in no very civil terms, for associating with slave traders and the perpetrators of cruelties. The Judge, trembling at the charge, coming from the quarter from which it did, refutes it

as far as it applies to himself, telling Mr Stephen, in a letter dated July 1st, 1821, that in the colony he only associated with the "families of the Governor-General Darling and Mr Telfair," adding, with strong marks of terror and alarm, " do for God's sake let me know with whom I am thus associated. As for Telfair, I should think the Missionary Society could vouch in his favour, and I can only further say, that I have made both open and secret enquiries as to his slave property-and I solemnly declare as a Christian and a gentleman, that I firmly believe him to have been most infamously and wickedly slandered by those who have accused

him!!"

*

It might have been supposed that this refutation by the judge of the colony, and that judge, too, Mr Stephen's particular friend, of the slanders against Mr Telfair and the Mauritius, given so far back as 1820 and 1821, would have prevented the publication of calumnies and falsehoods by the Anti-slavery Reporter in January, 1829. But no such thing. The defence of Mr Telfair and his amiable wife I must continue to draw, not from himself, but, as being more conclusive, from disinterested wit

nesses.

B. D. SAGE, Esq., page 227, says:"The chains, hooks, and collars, described by the Anti-slavery Monthly Reporter, are matters of pure invention, and in short, all that he says about yourself and Bel Ombre, is a rhapsody of disgusting folly, a tissue of bare-faced falsehoods. He must have had the heart of a demon who, amidst such a scene as your estates exhibit, could have imagined that man alone was starved and wretched, and tortured with unheard-of cruelty, and flogged to death." Mr LE BRUN, missionary, page 189, states, "that Mr Telfair was the first who attempted with success to teach the slaves reading, writing, and moral and religious instruction." And of Mr Telfair's estate, he says, "The little villa we saw in 1828, bore more the resemblance of a country village in England, than to huts for slaves. admired it, and said to my late friend (Mr Jones), how many country peasants in Europe would feel happy if they had such comfortable dwellings to put their fami

I

lies in, and every family with a Bible, and some among them capable of reading it to them. I could scarcely believe those were dwellings for slaves!" The Rev. Mr DENNY, first civil chaplain, Mauritius, gave equally strong and satisfactory testimony in favour of Mr Telfair, his character and his conduct.

Mr WARWICK, civil engineer, says, page 182, "I had the best possible opportunity of knowing the events of every passing day on the whole of the negroes on Bel Ombre. The instances of cruelty the years 1821 and 1822, the instru enumerated as having occurred during ments of cruelty mentioned, and the details relative to the housing, bedding, clothing, over-working, half-starving, and general punishment of the blacks, all so ingeniously published for the information of the world, in the 44th number of the Anti-slavery Monthly Reporter, are a tissue of falsehoods!!" Colonel DRAPER, collector of the customs, 1st Sept. 1829,

says: "These assertions in the Antislavery Monthly Reporter, are gross violations of truth. Indeed, were I called upon to delineate a character whose clemency would bear the strictest ordeal, the true likeness would be found in the proprietor of Bel Ombre, whom I could present even to the members of the Antislavery institution, and particularly to the speakers at its anniversary in 1828, as a philanthropist in whom nature had implanted the best affections of the heart." Captain MACKAY of his Majesty's 82d Regt., thus writes Mr Telfair: "I went over every part of the establishment of Bel Ombre in 1819. This was no cursory view. I walked alone among the people at all times, saw them at their meals, at their work, at their dances, at their devotions, and in their houses. I have never seen more hilarity and abundance in the same number of the labouring class at home. They are well fed, clothed, and sensible of their happiness. Their children are kept clean and neat in dress, and daily schooled for two or three hours in reading, writing, and arithmetic. I never saw any punishment, nor heard the sound of the whip in correction! As for the occupation of Sunday, it was dedicated to devotion in your family, when I often read sermon after you had read the prayers of the Church, surrounded by all your overseers, servants, and house slaves, and the whole of the estate had orders to attend at the school-house every evening, to join in prayers, &c. Such is the

guides which this country takes, and is called upon to take, and these men are the foremost to cry out calumny, uttered by all those who expose to public reprobation their proceedings and their statements!

The dogmas and orders of the Colonial department direct the authorities, more especially in the Colonies under the immediate orders of the King in Council. The consequences are sometimes as extraordinary as they are reprehensible. Take in proof the following occurrences which have lately taken place in the Mauritius. In that Colony they have no representative government, and the press is completely under the control of the Governor, whose Secretary is its Master and the Censor. This Censor lately prohibited the publication of an article giving an account of two negroes having killed and eaten a man and a boy, their comrades, lest the publication might reflect disgrace upon our African brethren; and by direction of the Governor, he has lately prohibited the publication in the island Gazette of the letters, beyond the middle of the second, which I have addressed to your Grace on the Colonial question. But the arbitrary power of the anti-colonial prompters and directors of the Colonial empire of Great Britain, is still more remarkably and sadly exemplified in some late proceedings, as these have been stated to me in a communication from that island, dated in June last. It is in substance as follows:

Some time ago, the planters in this island, in consequence of the great difficulty in procuring labourers, and anxious, if possible, to introduce some system, independent of slave cultivation, formed an association for the purpose of introducing free labourers to the island. Accordingly, they entered into arrangements with mercantile houses in Port Louis, having the command of ships, to procure for them the transportation of free labourers from India and the Malay Islands, and they were given to understand, that the scheme would meet with the Governor's support and approbation. Several vessels were, accordingly, fitted out to Singapore and Madras. A great number of Chinese and Malabar free-labourers, proffered their

services, and were hired for periods varying from 3 to 5 years, at a rate of wages somewhat lower than what prevailed in the Mauritius, but considerably higher than what could be obtained in their own country. The scheme was attended with much more difficulty and expense than was at first supposed. The charge of transporting these people came to about L.5 a-head, which, along with other incidental and unforeseen expenses, very nearly counterbalanced the cheapness of the wages at which they had been hired.

After considerable difficulty, about 1500 of these labourers were landed at Port Louis, during the last half of the year 1829. But, to the surprise and mortification of the Mauritius planters, the moment that these people came ashore on the island, the Colonial authorities interfered, and refused to allow them to proceed to the plantations, till security had been found by their employers, at the rate of L.25 a-head, for the good and peaceable behaviour of these foreigners, so long as they should remain on the island. The chief commissary of police, who had shortly before been the pay-master of a regiment in the garrison, was ordered to summon the planters to his office, where the peremptory orders of the authorities were announced to them, and the planters found themselves compelled, though with the greatest pos sible inconvenience, to lodge the security required, amounting to about L.37,500 sterling!

After the planters had thus complied with the wishes of the government, these Chinese and Malabar labourers were allowed to proceed to the estates of their respective employers; and though they had received two months' wages in advance, they soon became discontented with their situation, chiefly instigated by the bad advice which was given them by some of their countrymen, who were settled in the island as servants, shop-keepers, &c. told them that they were great fools to work for so low a rate of wages, that even the slaves received more than they did; that they ought to strike work, desert from their employers, and stand out till higher wages were offered. Unfortunately for all parties, these ignorant crea

They