Excerpt from Tamworth Election: Speech of Sir Robert Peel, June 28, 1841

Gentlemen, let us take care that this brighter page be not sullied by, the admission of slavesugar into the consumption of this country by our unnecessary encouragement of, slavery and the slave trade. Gentlemen, of all other description of slave produce, that of sugar is at once the most laborious and the most destructive to human life. If you take the number of deaths on a sugar plantation and compare them with those on a coffee or cotton plantation, you will find the increase infinitely greater in proportion than on either. Gentlemen, if then you admit slave-grown sugar to the British market-and here, oh serve, I again concede that sugar has almost become one Of the necessaries of life, and that a sufficient supply of it is therefore a matter of the utmost importance to the working classes Of this country - what becomes of your efforts for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade? [am now only inquiring whe ther there wants that degree of pressure upon the supply of the article which would justify us morally in encouraging slavery and, the slave trade by the admission of foreign slave-grown sugar f. If you admit it, it will come from Brazil and Cuba. In, Brazil the slave trade exists in full force; in Cuba it is un mitigated in its extent and horrors. The sugar of Cuba is the finest, in the world, but in Cuba slavery in unparalleled in its. Horr'ors. I do not at all overstate the fact when I say that slaves are annually landed in Cuba. That is the yearly importation into the island but when you take into c'onsidera tionfthe vast number that perish before they leave their, own coasts, the still greaternumber that die amidst the horrors of the middle passage, and the numbers that are lost at sea, you will come to the inevitable conclusion that the, number landed in Cuba; annually - is but a slight indication of the number shipped in Africa, or of the miseries, and destruction that have taken place, among them during their transport thither. Lfyou Open the markets of England to the sugar of' Cuban you may depend on it that you give a great stimulus to slavery and the slave, trade (hear). You, are making a great experiment in the West Indies - it has hitherto been more suc cessful than all the circumstances of the case warranted - the industry of those colonies have been somewhat paralyzed by the gift of freedom, to the slaves, There is now some difficulty, naturally enought infinding forthe present a sufficient supply of free 'labour, and; there is therefore rather a diminution in ouifsupply of sugar, for, the. Negroes have not yet come round to regular habits of working. It is, however, a, diminution and.

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