sation. Doubtless, to this pleasing scene there were some exceptions; doubtless the lash was a dangerous implement to trust in the hand of hard-hearted Christians; doubtless the character of the master in a great degree affected the prosperity of his subjects, and the cruel and the unfeeling had ample means of wreaking their vengeance on a helpless race. But these instances were the exception, not the rule. In the great majority of cases, the negroes on the estates were in such easy and affluent circumstances, as to be hardly credible but on the most uniform and concurring testimony. They had generally two days a-week, besides Sunday, during which they were at liberty to work in their gardens, or at wages on their own account; and so prolific were the powers of nature in that benignant climate, and such the reward of industry and good conduct, that after being provided, themselves and their families, better than any peasantry in Europe, they could lay by with ease thirty pounds a-year. Their cottages were generally comfortable, often elegant; artificial wants, civilized vanities, were making rapid progress amongst them; and the cheering spectacle of forty thousand negroes in Jamaica alone, who had worked out or obtained their own freedom, and were prosecuting with respectability and success the paths of honest industry, proved that the sable race was capable, in the end, of bearing emancipation; and that, by permitting time to work out the great social change from bondage to freedom, with its usual slow pace ace and unerring wisdom, it might be effected, as in modern Europe, in so gradual a manner as to render it impossible to say when the one ceased and the other began.

In these circumstances, the course which a wise and paternal government, in justice alike to the negroes, the planters, and the empire, should have done, was clearly this: They should have lowered to a very moderate amount the duties on colonial produce, considering the sugar of Jamaica as just as much a part of the domestic produce of the empire as the wheat of Middlesex; they should have cautiously abstained from every thing calculated to excite the negro population, or precipitate or endanger the vast change from servitude to independence, and limited themselves to such moderate measures as were

calculated to improve the comforts of the slave, and ensure to him the blessings of marriage, home, and the acquisition of property. Provision might have been made for every slave being entitled to purchase his freedom from his master, as soon as he had amassed his own value, which, at the current price of from sixty to eighty pounds, might have been generally done by industrious men in three years, and that all should have two days in the week to work for themselves. In this way, those only would have been liberated from the restraints of servitude who had afforded a convincing proof that they had acquired those of civilisation; full justice would have been done to the planters, by the receipt, in every instance, of the full market value of the slave; the negro population would have been gradually mingled with a free black race, capable of teaching them by their example, and influencing them by their habits; and the vast transition from savage to civilized life, from compulsory to voluntary labour, would have been accomplished, as it was in Europe, and some parts of southern America, so gradually as to be at once imperceptible and unattended with danger.

Instead of this, what have the British government, acting from first to last under the dictation of the masses, actually done? Their conduct may be reduced to three heads, which comprise the principal points of colonial misgovernment, and, more than the rashness of Lord Normanby or the prejudice of Sir Lionel Smith, have been the cause of the present disastrous state of those once magnificent settlements.

The first thing which they did, above forty years ago, was to lay a duty of thirty shillings a-hundredweight on sugar imported into this country, which was subsequently reduced to twenty-seven, and within these few years to twenty-four. A grosser instance of fiscal oppression, it may safely be said, never occurred, than in the imposition of so enormous a burden on an article of rude produce. In such a case, as it is well known, the producer cannot compensate the burden by superior skill or machinery in the production - little can be gained by that expedient in any department of field labour, as is clearly proved by the inability of the British farmer, with all the advantages of English skill, capital, and machinery, to rival the Polish, who is totally destitute of any of these advantages. The tax, therefore, required to be paid either by the producer or the consumer, and it is now clearly proved that almost the whole of it fell on the producers. The burden formerly of 30s., then 27s., and now of 24s. the hundredweight on West India sugar, was little felt during the war, when that article sold for forty or forty-five pounds the hogshead (from L.6 to L.6, 10s. the cwt.); but when, on the return of peace, prices fell to L.12 or L.15 the hogshead (from 50s. to 60s. the cwt. including duty), it became intolerably severe. It then became nearly a hundred per cent on the rude material; the same as if a duty of fifty shillings a quarter had been laid on wheat raised in England for the home consumption. Nor had either the planter or the refiner the means of eluding this tax to any considerable degree, by either raising the price of the article to the consumer, or diminishing by economy or machinery the cost of its production: the cost of raising rude agricultural produce can hardly ever be diminished to any considerable extent by the application of machinery; and the stoppage of the slave trade, necessarily, in the first instance at least, increased the cost of production, while the only way in which it seemed possible to render the burden tolerable, was by augmenting the quantity raised, which necessarily depressed to an undue extent the price which it bore in the market. Being unable to diminish the cost of production from these causes, all the efforts of the planters to make head against their difficulties, and defray the interest of their mortgages by raising more extensive crops of sugar, only tended to lower prices and throw the taxes as an exclusive burden on themselves. The proof of this is decisive: the price of sugar in America is generally higher than in England, if the duty be deducted, sometimes by fully a third. In 1831, the price per cwt. was, in Great Britain, 23s. 8d., excluding duty; while in America it was 36s. per cwt. in the same year. Taking into view the greater expense of freight to Britain than America from these islands, there can be no doubt that almost the whole tax has been paid in many years by the producers, amounting though it now does to 100 per cent. Nothing

more is requisite to explain the almost total ruin which has fallen on these splendid colonies, even before the last measure of emancipating the slaves was carried into effect.

In all fiscal measures on this subject, there is one principle to be constantly kept in view, to the neglect or oversight of which, more than any thing else, the ruin of the West Indies is to be ascribed. This is, that while many branches of manufacturing industry possess the means, by improvements in machinery or the division of labour, of compensating very heavy fiscal burdens, the raisers of rude produce can hardly ever do the same; so that, unless they can succeed in laying the tax upon the consumer, which is very often altogether beyond their power, they are forced to pay it entirely themselves, and it becomes a ruinous direct burden on industry. No doubt can exist on this head, when it is recollected not merely how slight is the improvement which agriculture has ever received from the aid of machinery; but that, while in the most highly civilized states, such as England, the cost of raising manufactures is always, notwithstanding heavy taxes and a plentiful currency, less than in ruder states, it is always much greater of producing agricultu ral produce. Great Britain can undersell the world in manufactures, but her farmers would be ruined without a corn law. If any one doubt that this enormous tax has, for the last twenty years past, fallen almost exclusively on the producers, would recommend that he should propose that a tax of fifty shillings a quarter should be forthwith laid on British wheat, and thirty on British oats. If such a burden were imposed, we apprehend it would give little comfort to the British farmer to tell him, that he could not be injured by the tax, for that it all fell on the consumer! Now, this is exactly what we have done for the last forty years with the West India proprietors; and no one can wonder, after such a crushing direct tax on production, that they have, after a severe struggle, almost all become deeply embarrassed, and that creditors and mortgagees consume in every case a half, in many the whole, produce of the soil.

we

The next step of British legislation was to pass the Emancipation Act in 1834, by which, in consideration of L.20,000,000 paid down to the plant. ers, the whole slaves were uncondi. tionally emancipated in five years, Much has been said of the extraordinary liberality of this grant, and the munificence of Parliament and the nation which made such a sacrifice in the cause of humanity. Admitting that the concession of so large a sum in name of compensation, was a magnanimous act on the part of the Imperial Parliament, which goes far to redeem the violent and disastrous nature of the step which they took, still nothing can be more certain than that it was very far indeed from affording indemnity to the proprietors, whose property was thereby taken away or rendered useless. The number of slaves emancipated was about 800,000; and the sum paid being L.20,000,000, the value para overhead for the slaves was just twenty-five pounds a-head, This was certainly not half, in truth

Average produce of

7 years, ending
1832,

1833,

1834,

1835,

1836,

little more than a third, of their worth, A good slave, in 1834, cost from seven. ty to ninety pounds; and, even inclu. ding women and children, it was esteemed a good bargain to get a hundred slaves for L.6000. It is going to the very outside to say, that the Government compensation was a half of the value of the slaves: in most instances it was not a third.

But what was the effect of this hasty measure of emancipation on the ave rage working of the negroes, and the produce of the estates after the apprentice system was introduced? Here we have authentic grounds to go upon. It appears, from the Lords' Report, 1838, No. 70, that the working of the first three years of the apprentice sys. tem has reduced the whole staple produce of the island of Jamaica aica fully full third, although the seasons were un. commonly fine. The numbers stood thus:

a

The Returns for 1837 and 1838 have not yet been laid before Parliament; but there can be no doubt that they will exhibit a decrease still more rapid indeed, we understand the crop of Jamaica for 1838 was barely 40,000 hogsheads, and that in 1839 it will not be 10,000. In short, the agricultural produce of the island is totally disappearing; the negroes, in the great majority of instances, either will not work at all for any wages, or are so extravagant in their demand for wages, and so irregular and inconstant in their habits, as to render it altogether impossible to continue the cultivation of sugar or coffee with any prospect of a profit. Unless some other race can be introduced, who will supply their place by free labour, and they peaceably retire to the mountains in the interior, there to squat and lead a life of savage indolence and penury, nothing is more certain than that in five years the cultivation of sugar in the West Indies will have entirely ceased, and nine-tenths of the estates will have irrevocably reverted to a state of nature. Could any thing else have been expected? St Domingo, before the

emancipation of its negroes, produced 700,000,000 pounds of sugar, being more than all the rest of the world put together: now it imports that article of produce! - Hear Napoleon on this subject: "Had any of your_philoso phic Liberals come out to Egypt to proclaim liberty to the blacks or the Arabs, I would have hung him up to the mast-head. In the West Indies similar enthusiasts have delivered over the whites to the ferocity of the blacks, and yet they complain of the victims of such madness being discontented. How is it possible to give liberty to Africans, when they are destitute of any species of civilisation, and ignorant even of what a colony or a mother country is? Do you suppose, that had they been aware of what they were doing, they would have given liberty to the blacks? Certainly not: but few persons at that time were sufficiently far-sighted to foresee the results; and feelings of humanity are ever powerful with excited imaginations. But now, after the experience we have had, to maintain the same principles cannot be done in good faith; it can be the result only o overweening self-confidence or hypocrisy."* Yet the British parliament, urged on by the British masses, did precisely, with the example of St Domingo before their eyes, what the Constituent Assembly had done, and a similar ruin must inevitably attend both colonies.

Are the friends of humanity, then, consoled by the rapid diminution of the slave trade, and the general amelioration of the African race, for the fatal blow thus struck at the West India colonies, and the evident ap. proaching extinction of a trade, which, before it was destroyed, employed 240,000 tons of British shipping, and took off L.3,800,000 worth of British manufactures? Alas! here the prospect is still darker; and the evident degradation and loss of their industrious habits, under the premature and blasting gift of freedom, and their rapid relapse into the indolence and insouciance of savage life, speak in a voice of thunder the irreparable ruin we have inflicted on the once-flourishing negro race in our West India colonies. Every arrival from those fatal settlements brings the same woful accounts of fields neglected, canes rotting, indolent negroes spending whole weeks in idleness, or casually working a few hours a-day, as caprice or some passing wish prompts them, and then relapsing into their pristine lazy and savage habits. It would fill a volume to quote any considerable number of these reports: they are all of the same character, and their results will be soon proclaimed in statistical returns, showing the rapid decline of the agricultural produce of the whole islands, which will at once silence misrepresentation and defy reply.

No other result could possibly have been anticipated from a measure which, however well intended, was founded on such absurd and delusive principles as the Slave Emancipation Act. The principle on which it proceeded was, that five years were sufficient to clothe the slave with the habits and desires of a freeman, and render the transition from servitude to liberty safe and salutary: it may safely be affirmed that five hundred years would have been little enough for the momentous change.. How long did it take to wear out slavery in the British islands?

Five centuries. Why was it never found possible to extirpate it even amidst all the refinements and civilisation of Greece and Rome? Why does it still exist, in undiminished and undiminishing vigour, over two-thirds of the globe? Evidently because it is a necessary step in the progress of civilisation: because without it savage man never has worked, and never will work; because without its coercion the human race would be chained for ever to the hunter or shepherd state; because, but for the slavery of our Saxon progenitors, we would now have been wandering in the woods; because, whatever evils may be attendant on servitude, and they are many and grievous, they are trivial in comparison of the universal and widespread penury, the total stoppage of the advance and prospects of the human race, which instantly follows the cursing of uncivilized man with the nominal blessings, but the real destitution, of freedom. To men in the stage of advance which the African negroes exhibit, liberty is the same thing as it would be to a herd of cattle or a troop of camels the signal for the immediate abandonment of the restraints and the enjoyments of domestic life, and resumption of the want, the penury, and independence of the prairie or the desert.

Does the cessation of the slave trade over the globe, the evident amelioration of the African race, and the stoppage of the unutterable horrors of the middle passage, console the friends of humanity for this disappointment of all their hopes, and blasting of their expectations on the other side of the Atlantic? Alas! here the prospect is even more gloomy than on the sunny slopes of Jamaica, now choked with weeds, or the rich marshes of Guiana, fast relapsing into jungle. The slave trade has been DOUBLED IN EXTENT AND QUADRUPLED IN HORRORS throughout the globe, by the monstrous act; and the sufferings of the African race, under European cupidity, is now incomparably greater than when the philanthropy of Wilberforce and Clarkson first interfered for their relief. The rapid decline in the agricultural produce of the British West India islands, has given an impulse to the foreign slave colonies which is almost incredible; and augmented to an extent which it is piteous to think of, both the number of blacks who are annually torn from their homes and their children in Africa, and the barbarity with which they are treated in their passage to the American shores. Twelve years ago, the only exports of Puerto-Rico were cattle and cof coffee,

and the only sugar she received was from importation. In 1833 she exported 33,750 tons more than a sixth of the whole British consumption. The export of sugar from Cuba was, on an average of 1814, 1815, and 1816, 51,000 tons; in 1833 it had risen to 120,000 tons. In 1814, 1815, and 1816, the average exports of sugar from Brazil was 26,250 tons; in 1833, though a bad year, the exports were 70,970 tons. The increase, since the Emancipation Act passed, has been still greater but no official accounts of these years have yet been made pub

lic.*

As might well have been expected, this prodigious increase in the produce of the foreign slave colonies, consequent on the progressive decline, and at length the almost total stoppage, of industry in the British settlements, under the influence of fiscal oppression and emancipation madness, has been obtained only by a vast increase in the importation of the African race, and a terrific addition to the sum of human suffering. The raising of sugar, by the stationary, domestic, half civilized English serf, who had ascended a few steps on the ladder of freedom, having ceased, or evidently approaching cessation, the void has been supplied by an extraordinary multiplication of African savages, who are now treated and worked with a severity, compared to which, the condition of our domesticated slaves was Paradise.-" Great and deplorable as were the sufferings of the captives in crossing the Atlantic, in the large and capacious Liverpool slaveships, they are as nothing compared to those which have since been, and are still, endured by the negroes in the hands of the Spanish and Portuguese traders, where several hundred wretches are stowed between decks in a space not three feet high; and in addition

*

to the anguish inseparable from a state of captivity, they are made to endure, for weeks together, the horrors of the black-hole of Calcutta. Nearly two hundred thousand captives, chained together in this frightful manner, now annually cross the Atlantic; and they are brought, not to the comparatively easy life of the British West India Islands, but to the desperate servitude of Cuba or Brazil; in the latter of which several hundred negroes are worked, like animals, in droves together, without a single female among them, and without any attempt to perpetuate their race; they are worn down by their cruel taskmasters to the grave by a lingering process, which on an average terminates their existence in seven years!"†

What does Mr Buxton, a most unexceptionable authority on this point, say to the amount of this fortuitous increase of the foreign slave trade of late years? "Twenty years ago, the African Institution reported to the Duke of Wellington, that the number of slaves who annually crossed the Atlantic was 70,000. There is evidence before the Parliamentary Committees to show, that about one-third was for the British islands, one-third for St Domingo; so that, if the slave trade of other countries had been stationary, they ought only to import 25,000; whereas, the number landed in Cuba and Brazil alone is 150,000 annually; being more than double the whole draft on Africa, including the countries where it had ceased, when the slave trade controversy began. Twice as many human beings are now its victims as when Wilberforce and Clarkson entered on their noble task; and each individual of this increased number, in addition to the horrors which were endured in former times, has to suffer from being cribbed up in a narrower space, and on board a vessel where accommodation is sacrificed to speed. Painful as this is, it becomes still more distressing if it shall appear that our present system has not failed by mischance, or want of energy, or want of expenditure; but that the system itself is erroneous, and must necessarily end in disappointment." †

The remedy which Mr Buxton and