(in Jamaica) is filing bills in chancery to foreclose; although when he has obtained his decree he hesitates to enforce it, because he must himself become the proprietor of the plantation, of which, from fatal experience, he knows the consequences."

The same document proceeds to assert that "Sheriff's officers are everywhere selling property at less than half the original cost," that "all kind of credit is at an end," that "confidence has ceased," and that "a faithful detail would have the appearance of a frightful caricature."

In 1807 a West India Committee of the British House of Commons reported "that since the year 1792 there had taken place a progressive deterioration in the situation of the planters." A report of the Jamaica House of Assembly, in the same year, declared that within the five or six previous years "sixty-five estates had been abandoned, thirty-two sold under decrees of chancery, and there were one hundred and fifteen more respecting which suits in chancery were pending, and many other bills preparing." They also stated that "the sugar estates lately brought to sale, and now in chancery in this island and in England, amount to about one fourth of the whole number in the colony; and the committee anticipated, very shortly, the bankruptcy of a much larger part of the community, and in the course of a few years that of the whole class of sugar planters, with few exceptions."

The unprofitable and ruinous tendency of the system of slavery, even under the most advantageous circumstances, must, from these extracts, be evident to the most skeptical; for, be it remembered, they refer to a period when the planters could command an unlimited supply of slaves to repair that waste of life continually resulting from the effort to extract from the soil all the profit it was capable of yielding; yet the colonial slaveholders could not ward off embarrassment and ruin. For more than half a century their condition had been gradually deteriorating. And it is equally capable of demonstration, that after the termination of the slave-carrying trade, the possession of more than eight hundred thousand slaves did not enable the planters to cultivate sugar and coffee, and other productions, either so extensively or so profitably as to pay them for the heavy expenditure with which compulsory labor must ever be attended. They continued to plunge deeper and deeper into distress and insolvency.

In 1808 a committee of the House of Commons recommended the suspension of the use of grain in the distilleries of Great Britain for one year, in order "to save the West Indies from the disasters which awaited them in consequence of the depreciation in the price

of sugar, and the increased expense attendant on its cultivation, the value of the produce being barely equal to the charges of production, leaving no rent for land, and no interest for the large capital employed on it." (The price was about that time thirty-four shillings per cwt.) The committee stated that one hundred and fifteen sugar estates were then in the Court of Chancery," that "foreclosures had become unusually frequent," and that annuitants dependent on West India property for their provision, had in many instances been totally deprived of their income."*

In 1812 a memorial from the Jamaica planters to the crown states: "The ruin of the original possessors of property has been completed; exactions, debasement, and privations have been long and patiently endured by the proprietors; a large portion of them now see approaching the lowest state of human misery, absolute want to their families, and the horrors of a jail for themselves. Estate after estate has passed into the hands of mortgagees and creditors absent from the island, until there are large districts, whole parishes, in which there is not a single proprietor of a sugar plantation resident."

In 1813 Mr. Marryatt, an eminent colonial agent, during a debate in Parliament on the sugar question, declared that "there were comparatively few estates in the West Indies that had not during the last twenty years been sold, or given up to creditors."

In 1821 the Jamaica House of Assembly addressed the king "on the distresses which afflicted the colony," and complained of "the pressure of unmitigated suffering." And in 1822 another address was presented to the king by the House of Assembly, petitioning for "assistance to rescue the landholders and capitalists from ruin, and the laborers from absolute want."

In 1824 a somewhat similar memorial declared that property had "gradually depreciated to one half its value;" and in 1825 the still increasing sufferings of the planters were dolefully set forth.

In 1826 another memorial, laid before the throne, asserted that "commerce was gradually deserting the shores of Jamaica," that 'signs of prosperity were no longer perceptible; one universal gloom lowered all around, and ruin in the most dreadful shape, and to all appearance inevitable, was advancing with rapid strides."

In 1831 Viscount Goderich, then colonial secretary, in a dispatch dated November 5, observed: "The existence of severe commercial distress among all classes of society connected with the West Indies is, unhappily, too evident. Without denying the concurrence of many causes, it is obvious that the great and permanent source of distress which almost every page of the West Indies reParliamentary Report, April 13, 1808.

cords is to be found in the institution of slavery. It is in vain to hope for long-continued prosperity in any country in which the people are not dependent on their own voluntary labor for support; in which labor is not prompted by legitimate motives, and does not earn its natural reward. I cannot but regard the system itself as the perennial spring of those distresses of which, not only at present, but during the whole of the last fifty years, the complaints have been so frequent and so just."

In 1832, eighteen months before the passing of the emancipation act by the British Legislature, the West India body in England petitioned Parliament, declaring that "the alarming and unprecedented state of distress in which the whole of the British West India interest is at this time involved, justifies them in imploring the Legislature to adopt prompt and effectual measures of relief, in order to preserve them from inevitable ruin."

It is thus evident, beyond all doubt, that the financial and commercial condition of the slave colonies had for nearly a century been declining from bad to worse, and that about the time of emancipation they had well-nigh reached the last stage of prostration. It is altogether a fallacy to ascribe the ruin which came upon some of the planters to the abolition of slavery; as gross a perversion of truth as can well be conceived. The system of slavery itself was, as Lord Goderich justly observes, "the perennial spring of all their distresses." And it could not well be otherwise. Apart from those causes of expense and embarrassment which have been referred to as existing before Great Britain terminated the African slave-trade to the colonies, no landed property in the world could bear the burdens which were imposed upon the plantations in the West Indies, and the drain to which they were continually subjected. The already insolvent proprietors continued to the last to live in splendid style in England, or elsewhere, on money advanced, sometimes at the rate of fifteen or twenty per cent., by the merchants to whom their sugar, rum, and coffee were consigned; while the whole properties, including lands, buildings, and slaves, were heavily mortgaged. Meanwhile this system of absenteeism, combined with slavery, necessitated the maintenance of a perfect hierarchy of agencies, all salaried and sustained at the expense of the estates. Supposing a plantation to have upon it four hundred slaves, which an estate of five or six hundred acres would require, the supplies which were necessary for these slaves, and for the property generally, would be sent out by the merchant consignee at his own price. To superintend these four hundred slaves the services of four or five white book-keepers, each possessing a horse, were required, one taking

charge of the boiling-house, another of the still-house, another of the cattle, and one or more superintending the working gangs in the field; for the law required the employment of a given number of these white officials, in proportion to the number of slaves on the plantation, with the view of keeping up an effective militia force, in which all of them were enrolled, to check or put down insubordination on the part of the negroes, of which the colonists stood in perpetual fear. In addition to these book-keepers there would be a head carpenter, a head mason, etc., etc., also white men, that they might be qualified for serving in the militia. Superior to all these was the overseer or manager, residing on the plantation, with his harem, and a large retinue of servants and horses, all maintained at the cost of the estate. Above the overseer was the attorney, so called from the legal instrument, or "power of attorney," by virtue of which he took the general management and direction as the representative of the proprietor; not, however, resident on the estate, but occupying the "great house," or mansion, whenever he thought fit to visit the plantation, and where, generally for his convenience, a mistress with another retinue of servants were maintained at the cost of the luckless proprietor, the attorney claiming and receiving his commissions on all the produce of the estate for the trouble of acting as the proxy of the absentee. Last of all there was the merchant in England, holding mortgages on the plantation at high rates of interest, to whom all produce must be consigned, that he too might be entitled to charge his commissions for receiving and disposing of it. All that could go to the account of the proprietor was just the overplus after these several demands had been met, and the wear and tear of cattle and machinery supplied. Consequently, when through mismanagement or misfortune, such as failure of crops, etc., the plantations failed to produce the amount necessary to cover all these expenses, and supply the extravagant demands of the proprietor to keep up his princely style of living, the merchants made further advances on mortgage, and the plantations generally became more hopelessly involved.

What farms in Europe or America, we may ask, could bear the operation of a system like this, or endure such impositions, without bringing their owners to ruin? Yet this reckless system of extravagance was almost universal in the British West Indies down to the very day when emancipation took place, augmenting year by year the debts and difficulties of the landed proprietors, and producing that general insolvency which we have shown was so loudly and justly complained of.

Such was the financial condition of a large proportion of the West

Indies, and such the causes which produced it, when, in 1834, the absolute slavery of former years gave place to the apprenticeship system. Slavery, like the deadly upas, had spread a blighting influence over all that it covered, and had brought all who were concerned with it to the verge of ruin. Bad as their affairs were, many of the proprietors might have been preserved from the fate which has come upon them, if they had acted with the discretion and promptitude which the urgency of their affairs demanded. If they had visited their properties, and taking advantage of the kindly disposition which the negroes felt toward them personally, and of the grateful desire which they cherished of showing themselves, by their industry and good conduct, worthy of freedom, if they had established new and amicable relations with them, placing the estates under a more satisfactory system of management, and abolishing the cumbrous and expensive machinery which had been found necessary for the coercion of slave labor, but which was required no longer, the best results might have been obtained, and families now reduced to hopeless indigence, by an absolute adherence to that system of absenteeism and neglect which had already wrought so great an amount of evil, might have struggled through their difficulties, and now been living in comparative wealth and comfort, surrounded by an honest, laborious, and happy peasantry.

Very few of the Jamaica planters took this prudent course. Loth to give up the attractions of European society, or possessed with exaggerated fears of a tropical climate, most of them refrained from even a temporary visit to their plantations, and the overseers and the negroes were left to settle matters as best they could, under the nominal supervision of the planting attorneys; some of whom had themselves become landholders, and their attention being naturally directed first to their own properties, they could seldom find time to do more for their constituents than to correspond officially with the actual managers, and assent, as a matter of course, to arrangements which imperatively demanded the active investigation of persons deeply interested in the welfare of the estate. Thus left to themselves, the overseers, notwithstanding the warnings of successive governors, and many of the more upright and conscientious of the special magistrates, continued the cruel and ignominious treatment of the negroes which they had practiced up to the termination of the apprenticeship, and pursued altogether a line of conduct which was most disastrous to the estates and fatal to the interests of their employers. Mr. R. M. Martin, who visited several of the colonies to ascertain the actual condition of affairs, says, in his elaborate work on the colonies, from which we have already quoted: