"Deprived of the power of coercion by the whip, the overseer thought only of using it in another form, by the exaction of oppressive rents; and if these were not paid, the cattle were turned in on the provision grounds of the people, their few pigs, goats, and poultry shot, and the ties of old association which might, and (from the peculiar attachment cherished by the negro to the spot on which he was born) probably would have sufficed to attach them to the properties to which they had previously belonged, were thus rudely and forever severed. By impolitic harshness and neglect, a large number of people were compelled, in self-defense, to cease from being laborers on the sugar estates, and to become cottiers; the more so, because the high price of provisions absolutely necessitated that they should grow food for their families, who must otherwise have starved. Proprietors, or their agents, have therefore, to a great extent, themselves to blame for the diminution of labor which they experienced, and which has tended to bring about a diminution of sugar and coffee."

Mr. Martin further says:

"Under the most favorable circumstances, the want of capital would have been of necessity a serious bar to the employment of labor, but the conduct of many of the overseers, in withholding the promised wages upon frivolous and even false pretenses, greatly increased these difficulties. The provision grounds formerly allotted to the negroes, soon became a bone of contention; for not only were the most exorbitant rents demanded and enforced by a petty-debt act, which afforded great facilities for the obtainment of fictitious or exaggerated claims, but the questions of rent and wages were willfully mixed up, so as to be a constant source of vexatious oppression to the negro, whose natural desire to obtain a freehold of his own, and thus become independent of such influence, was stimulated to the highest degree. Once master of that much coveted possession, the laborer could no longer be induced to relinquish its profitable cultivation, unless the wages offered him for toiling elsewhere were both remunerative and certain. This many overseers had it not in their power to offer; however willing, they could not furnish, on the Saturday evening, those weekly earnings which the laborer, all the world over, rightly values so much more when paid regularly, and in cash, than by any other system. The consequence was a loud outcry for more labor, which there was not capital to employ."

That these statements are entirely true, especially of Jamaica, the writer of this article can bear witness, having been resident in that island at the time of the emancipation, and for fourteen years after it took place; and also standing in such a relation to the emancipated people as brought him to an intimate acquaintance with their affairs. Not unfrequently the planters, after the abolition of the apprenticeship, when the people had become renters of the houses and allotments of land which they had previously occupied, extorted, or endeavored to extort, from each of the several adult members of the family, in labor, the full amount of rent due for the whole premises which they collectively occupied; thus actually compelling them to pay for the same cottage and land several times over. Resistance

to this extortion caused much litigation in the petty law courts, and often led to the destruction of the laborers' gardens and provision grounds, and their small live stock, by the vindictive overseer.

numerous cases the wages of the people, for want of the necessary capital to carry on the culture of the plantation, were withheld by the overseers, or paid only in part, for many weeks together; and multitudes complained that under various pretexts they were defrauded of a considerable part of the fruit of their toil; a complaint so well founded that a planting attorney, who had a large number of plantations and properties under his management, acknowledged to a friend of ours that he made them profitable by doing the people out of a portion of their wages. The effect it is not difficult to conceive. The prevalence of such practices as these produced much suffering, and gave rise to many heart-burnings among the laborers, and at length induced the missionaries, who had always been the steadfast friends of these oppressed children of Africa, to take up in convenient localities, and on their own personal responsibility, large portions of land, which could be obtained cheaply, and divide them into allotments of greater or less extent. To these the people removed, paying for the land by instalments obtained by their industry and the practice of a rigid economy. In this manner Jamaica, and some other islands where land was available for the purpose, became rapidly overspread with negro towns and villages; and the laborers, freed from the galling tyranny and endless annoyances to which they had been subjected, settled on their own freeholds, building comfortable cottages, in which, with their families, they could dwell in peace. So extensively did this system prevail, that in Jamaica alone many thousand small freeholds were registered in the island record office during the first ten years after the final emancipation of the negroes.

Even under the discouraging circumstances we have described, the people generally continued to labor where they had anything like a reasonable prospect of obtaining the wages they earned. We have known them work for many weeks together on the plantations, receiving only part of their earnings, or only the promise of payment, sustaining themselves meanwhile by the produce of their own grounds. Where there was the ability to pay reasonable wages, and to pay them regularly, the planters never found any lack of laborers. The railway between Kingston and Spanish Town was constructed about 1845-6 entirely by negro labor; and although it is a more laborious kind of toil than the ordinary work of the sugar or coffee plantations, we were told by one of the principal managers of the works that they could always command labor to any extent they required, and that no people could work better than the negroes did. The reason he assigned was, that "their wages were paid in full, and without any vexatious disputes, or objections, every Saturday after

noon." In the West Indies, as elsewhere, the people will labor under the influence of those motives and inducements which in all parts of the world are necessary to make men submit to monotonous daily toil. Without such inducements they cannot reasonably be expected to labor; nor have they had such a training under the old dispensation, from which they are now happily delivered, as was calculated to make them become enamored of unrequited toil.

That under such a state of things as then existed many plantations and estates should either drag on very heavily, or fall out of cultivation altogether, was unavoidable. The embarrassed proprietors, after the emancipation, became more and more encumbered with debts and difficulties, in consequence of their own supineness and neglect, and the infatuated conduct of their agents and representatives in the colonies. But that which brought to a crisis, in most cases, the ruin which we have shown slavery itself had wrought, was the free-trade policy adopted by Sir Robert Peel's government in 1846. From the beginning of the sugar cultivation in the West Indies, almost a perfect monopoly of the British market was secured to the West India interest, by the imposition of heavy protective duties on foreign produce, and this protection they enjoyed without interruption until 1846, when, among the other great fiscal changes of the period, it was determined to reduce the sugar duties, and finally to remove altogether the protection which had hitherto been given to West India produce. Being entirely unprepared for such a sweeping change, and having utterly neglected to adopt those improvements in the culture and manufacture of their produce which alone could enable them to enter upon a successful competition with the slave-grown produce of Cuba, Porto Rico, Brazil, etc., (for they have always been notoriously slow to adopt improvements of any kind whatever,) the emancipated colonies were for a season prostrated by this unlooked-for blow. The compensation money which accompanied the act of emancipation had warded off for a while the ruin which impended over the great bulk of the proprietors; for although it did not go immediately into their hands, being claimed and taken up by the merchant mortgagees of the estates, yet it placed these mortgagees in a position to make further advances, and so enabled the planters to struggle on for a few years longer. Some, in Barbadoes, Antigua, and St. Kitts, by the adoption of a well-timed economy, and a kindly treatment of the laborers, and by turning their attention to practical improvements in raising and manufacturing their produce, struggled through their difficulties, saving themselves and their properties, and were able to survive the crisis of 1846. But with the larger number of those who held West India property

it was otherwise. The equalization of the sugar duties caused that article to go down below fifty per cent. in the British market; the depreciation of West India property became very great, beyond all precedent; merchants and capitalists shrunk from making further investments in the colonies while so dark a cloud lowered over them; the already ruined planters came to a stand, and their properties, for want of capital, either fell into other hands by the foreclosure of mortgages, or else fell out of cultivation altogether. In British Guiana, to use the words of the commissioners who were appointed in 1851 to inquire into the condition and prospects of the colony, "the sugar act of 1846 at once prostrated the whole landed interest of the country, and has been already, in 1850, the total ruin of many an opulent proprietor. Names, the highest and most influential, have followed one another in the gazette with ominous rapidity; and the estates of men formerly holding the highest positions in the colony, have been successively brought to the hammer, and their owners absolutely beggared."

In Trinidad, within three years after the passing of that bill, no less than fifty-six sugar estates were either wholly or in part abandoned. Lord Harris, the governor, writing to the home government on the distress of the planters, says: "Since the passing of the sugar bill, equalizing the duties on free and slave sugar, and admitting slave-grown sugar on equal terms with our sugar into the home markets, nineteen planters have gone through the insolvent court; their liabilities amount to £370,000; the average dividend paid is three pence three farthings in the pound."

But in Jamaica the effect was still more fatal, for there the insolvency wrought by slavery and absenteeism was more general than in the other colonies. From a return published by the House of Assembly, it was shown that, within four years after January 1, 1848, there were in that island 128 sugar plantations, 96 coffee properties, and 30 cattle-breeding estates, called pens, wholly abandoned; and 71 sugar plantations, 66 coffee properties, and 22 cattle-breeding pens partially abandoned; comprising altogether 391,187 acres, all of which had been continued in cultivation until the ruin of their embarrassed proprietors was finally consummated by the agricultural and commercial depression consequent upon the free-trade policy of Sir Robert Peel.

It is necessary that these facts should thus be placed on record, that the West India question may be rightly understood, and that emancipation may not be held chargeable with consequences which have proceeded from other and widely different causes. The apologists and advocates of slavery point exultingly to the British West FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XII.-4

Indies; and directing attention to the financial ruin which has come upon the former slaveholders, and to those plantations and estates the cultivation of which the owners could not command capital to carry on, they denounce emancipation as a Quixotic act, injurious to both master and servant, detrimental to commercial interests, and therefore to be considered as a warning, rather than held forth as a lesson, for the guidance of other slaveholding states. But this they do in ignorance both of the past history and the present condition of those colonies, which, as hereafter will be shown, are now rising, under the benign influence of freedom, from the prostration. and the manifold evil to which they were subjected under the system of slavery, and for which, as results are making manifest, emancipation was the appropriate and the only effective remedy.

Admit that owners of West India property have been reduced to indigence, that once valuable properties of various kinds have ceased to be cultivated; that their buildings are now dismantled, and that in several of the islands the exports of staple commodities are less than they were some years ago; the foregoing extracts clearly prove that these are but the natural and unavoidable results of causes which had been in active operation for many years before any proposition for the liberation of the slaves was submitted to the consideration of the British Parliament. As well might the disastrous effects of a conflagration which has ruined and desolated a whole neighborhood, be ascribed to the fire-engines and those efforts of the fire brigade by which the devouring element has been subdued and its destructive ravages arrested, as these results be attributed to emancipation. Slavery exhausted the resources of the planters, and the sudden withdrawal of the protection with which for many years they had been favored, at the cost of the nation, brought their ruined affairs to a crisis; and the colonies have not yet had sufficient time to recover fully from the blighting influence thus shed upon them. They are yet in a transition state, but the restorative process initiated by emancipation is going on; and the indications, in all respects, are such as to assure us that the West Indies have yet, in a financial and commercial sense, to see their most prosperous days. Jamaica, stained with deeper blood-guiltiness under the old system than any of the other colonies, has felt the depression more, and is the last to rise in the scale of prosperity; which may be partly owing to the fact that the estates and plantations there were generally on a larger scale than in the other islands, and therefore not so easily brought again under cultivation when once abandoned; but the causes which have operated in most of the smaller islands to raise them above all the difficulties and discouragements which the slave system