Excerpt from An Official Letter From the Commissioners of Correspondence, of the Bahama Islands, to George Chalmers, Esq.: Colonial Agent; Concerning the Proposed Abolition of Slavery in the West Indies To await the maturity of time and of circumstance ab solutely necessary to convert slavery into freedom, and by the only means which can effect that change, with safety to the public weal, and justice to the owners, or real be nefit to the slaves, but ill suits the impatience of our abo litionists, now for the first time openly avowed. And because no hope can reasonably be indulged, that the colo nies themselves will adopt any very hasty measures on the subject, Parliament and the nation are vehemently called upon to interfere in a manner equally unconstitutional and unjust, and in palpable violation of the good faith of the country, and the repeated pledges, not only of government, but of the very party itself which has now at length une masked its last battery upon the falling fortunes of the colonies. The abolitionists, indeed, affect to speak of us, as if the work of emancipation had never yet been begun in the British West Indies: when in fact, it has not only had a beginning, but already made a degree of progress in most of the colonies, as we believe, and certainly in this one, almost beyond those limits, within which a cautious policy might have fairly restrained them. It is well known that all the islands abound in free blacks and people of colour that is, slaves or the descendants of slaves manua. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.