[The MG hated slavery but also dreaded any prospect of civil war in the US. From that ambivalence, partly related to cotton, sprang this early leader, in which disquiet about an American lecture tour by the English abolitionist George Thompson generated a peaceful proposal for achieving abolition.
Few persons, we believe, read with greater disgust accounts of the traffic in human flesh in the slave estates than we do; few have a deeper sense of the moral evil of slavery; and few have a more anxious desire that this great plague spot should no longer remain attached to the mighty republic of the west.
But we cannot but doubt the propriety, as well as the prudence, of Englishmen going out to America and busying themselves in the affair. This may be called "pandering to the vices and prejudice of the slaveholders" but it is nothing of the sort.
Here Mr. Thompson could [have acted] not only without risk to himself but to others. The government was not only desirous to promote emancipation but able to enforce it. There was no perilous admixture of a black and white population in our towns; the prejudices of caste, and the moral degradation, were unknown amongst us; and the people of England felt that, as they and their government had in former times created a property in human flesh, it was for them to bear the pecuniary cost of the sacrifice, it was worthy of Great Britain, to accompany the abolition of slavery by compensation to the slave-owners.
"When I think of your compensation grant," said an eminent American minister, "I glory in being descended from a Briton."
But in the United States the question is surrounded by difficulties sufficient to make it very embarrassing even for the wisest statesmen and legislators. There is no authority in their general government which can compel manumission of the slaves, as was in the power of the British government with respect to the West Indies.
Slavery is a monstrous evil, but civil war is not a less one; and we would not seek the abolition even of the former through the imminent hazard of the latter.
Are we then prepared to see the question of negro emancipation in America indefinitely cushioned? By no means. We believe the time has arrived when it ought to be dealt with.
The leader goes on to point out that the US exchequer has achieved "an astonishing superfluous wealth" of £3.5m, mainly through customs tariffs. This could be used to indemnify slave-owners and slave-owning states for freeing their captives - at a stroke, the paper implies.