AND TRANSPORTATION. 385 questions. No doubt he was aware of tke moral objections 1780 to tlie transportation system^ and was well acquainted with the views of the colonists on that subject;* but he never raised his voice against it^ except when he protested againat the inhumanity of sending convicts to the African coast. Clearly as he saw that, he did not seem to see that there were No protest equally grave objections to sending shiploads of ^criminals tnwwporta- to colonise a new country. The moral sentiment of the age on such questions, so far as it had any existence, found no expression in him. He had nothing to say about the iniquities of the system, and much less than might have been expected about the horrors of the slave trade— the two most objectionable facts in the history of his time.f What the slave trade meant to the colonies may be seen The slave in the case of the West Indies and the United States — the one ruined by it, the other forced to undergo the most terrible struggle recorded in history in order to get rid of it. But neither the picture of desolation and decay pre- sented in the case of the Indies, nor the one million lives and two thousand millions of money wasted by the States, can be said to furnish an adequate measure of the eviluMmnof inflicted on the colonies through the long years of its existence. That must be left to the imagination. It would be equally difficult to form an estimate of the wrong done to them by the transportation of convicts to their shores. To plant criminals in every little centre of population
- Burke had no donbt read the History of the Province of New York,
by William Smith, A.M., pablished in London in 1776, in which the author explained the slow rate of increase in the popnlation as follows : — ** Mkmj have been the discouragements to the settlement of this colony. The fVench and Indian irruptions, to which we have always been exposed, have driven many families into New Jersey. At home, the British Acts for the transportation of felons have brought all the American colonies into dis- credit with the industrious and honest poor, both in the kingdom of Great Britain and in Ireland.'* — Poet, p. 536. t In 1786, England employed one hundred and thirty ships in the Slave trade, and carried off forty-two thousand slaves from their homes to the plantations. The trade was not abolished until 1807.— Haydn, Dictiooai^ of Dates. The delay in England is usually attributed 4o the peculiar atti- tude adopted bv Pitt, who always declaimed elo<^uently m favour of abolition, but allowed his colleagues to vote against it. 2 B Digitized by Google
