ART. II.-RESULTS OF WEST INDIA EMANCIPATION.

[SECOND ARTICLE.]

IT is not difficult to account for the misapprehensions which prevail concerning the British West Indies, and the working of emancipation in those colonies. To some extent they have been created by the promptings of a grasping cupidity, anxious to make out a case that may possibly justify to the British government the policy of reviving the slave-trade from Africa, disguised under the specious designation of "free-labor immigration." Such, doubtless, was the origin of certain unscrupulous communications addressed to, and published in the London Times newspaper a few months ago, which were pervaded throughout by the grossest misrepresentations concerning the West India colonies. It was a very significant coincidence that those communications appeared about the time when the Jamaica legislature was engaged in preparing the details of a measure which was intended to legalize a descent upon the coast of Africa for the purpose of carrying off more of her children, nominally as free laborers, but really and truly to consign them to bondage and misery, and, in multitudes of instances, to an early grave in the West Indies. Here deceit and falsehood were appropriately employed to pave the way for the adoption of a new system of legalized robbery and murder, similar to that which has already, in Jamaica and elsewhere, robbed tens of thousands of wretched coolies of hope and life. Happily, however, the British government has shielded the nation from this additional guilt and dishonor by promptly disallowing the Jamaica bill.

In some cases the publication of misleading statements, and the utterance of opinions quite at variance with facts, may be accounted for without attributing intentional misrepresentation to their authors. These do not proceed from parties resident in the colonies; for, after a protracted residence there, we are not acquainted with one individual that would pronounce emancipation to be a failure; they are generally from transient visitors, who have neither time nor opportunity, nor perhaps the disposition to institute, upon the spot a fair and impartial investigation of the subject concerning which they give their lucubrations to the world. A person on his way to California, Central America, or elsewhere, is a passenger in a steamer or other vessel that touches at a West India port, it may be Kingston, in Jamaica, where he spends a few hours, or possibly two

or three days. He observes about the wharves, and the streets adjacent thereto, as may be seen in any considerable shipping port, a number of loose and profligate persons of both sexes, whose appearance, manners, and conversation, all alike repulsive, indicate that they belong to the very dregs and outcasts of society. Their dark complexion shows that they are of the class emancipated from slavery a few years ago; and taking these as samples of the population, and seeing nothing of the industrious, well-ordered peasantry in the interior, he writes to his friends, or to the newspapers, that the emancipated colored people of the West Indies have "degenerated into a community of vagrants, paupers, and thieves." Being informed also that in that particular island the export of staple productions is less than it formerly was, without taking any trouble to ascertain if other causes have contributed to such a result, or whether it is the same in all the colonies, he jumps to the conclusion, and gives it a world-wide circulation, that under emancipation, and as the result of it, the West India colonies are becoming rapidly overspread with desolation, and sinking into poverty and ruin. It is thus that, to a great extent, misapprehension has gone abroad, and the public mind has been abused; while a certain portion of the press has eagerly availed itself of these mistakes and misrepresentations, for purposes easy to be understood, and described the great act of justice and humanity on the part of Great Britain in emancipating her slaves, the greatest and noblest act of modern times, as a mistake and failure.

It would not be difficult, after a similar method of reasoning, to make out that Great Britain and the United States are both inhabited by a community of idlers and thieves; taking the loungers and bad characters who frequent the banks of the Thames below London Bridge, or the immediate vicinity of the East River in New York, as samples of the population of the two countries. It is not peculiar to the West Indies that the most worthless and abandoned of the population crowd into the largest towns and cities, and abound in the neighborhood of wharves and shipping places; and to estimate the character and condition of a whole people from such specimens is alike unjust and absurd. It is in this way, according to Mr. Bowen, whose lectures on Africa have been recently attracting some attention, that the whole civilized world has been deceived with regard to the character and habits of the people in the interior of Western Africa. He says: "We had judged all the Africans by the few fishermen and slavedealers on the coast. We thought them an exceedingly lazy people. So the coast men were. But in the interior they were industrious enough." So in the West Indies.

Let these transient visitors travel into the interior of the islands, and look upon the agricultural population in their own neat and quiet homes, and become acquainted from observation with their daily habits; they will find themselves surrounded by an industrious, respectful, orderly, and law-obeying people, very different from the sottish and disorderly rabble which first arrested their attention on the wharf at which they landed. And let them take the trouble to investigate the subject fully, and they will discover that although great commercial depression has prevailed in all the islands, yet the falling off in staple products is limited to a few of them, being more than made up in others; and that where cultivation has been abridged, it may, as shown in a preceding article, be ascribed to the operation of causes entirely distinct from the abolition of slavery.

The greatest depression which the agricultural and commercial interests of the West Indies ever experienced, occurred during the five or six years immediately following the adoption of the free-trade policy of Sir Robert Peel's government, and the measure for equalizing the duties on British and foreign sugars. Then it was that a large number of proprietors were brought to a stand, for want of capital to continue the culture of their estates, and some hundreds of properties of different kinds were thrown out of cultivation altogether. The mortgagees, up to this time, had continued to make advances. sparingly to their insolvent constituents, which they were able to do from the compensation money for the slaves which they had received, and which, taking Jamaica as an example, would, on a plantation possessing four hundred slaves, amount to between eighty and ninety thousand dollars. But when the act to which we have referred passed, in 1846, the price of sugar went down in the British market at least. 50 per cent.; property in the West Indies became fearfully depressed in value; the merchants and capitalists shrunk, as a matter of course, from making investments or continuing advances while. such a gloom rested upon the colonies; and, as the natural and unavoidable result, many of the planters, who were entirely dependent upon such advances, were necessitated to discontinue the cultivation of their estates, just as many persons, during the late monetary crisis in England and the United States, were compelled, from causes very similar, to give up the business in which they were engaged.

The darkest period, therefore, in the financial history of the West Indies dates from 1846 to 1853, when the crisis was passed. Then sugar rose again to a price sufficient to remunerate the grower, and gleams of prosperity, almost unhoped for, shone athwart the gloom, proving to be the harbingers of a brighter day to the disheartened planters. If we take the last year of slavery in the colonies, 1833-4,

and exhibit, in a tabular view, their condition at that time, as to population, revenue, imports, exports, and shipping, and then look at their condition with regard to these several particulars in 1851-2, five years after Sir Robert Peel's free-trade measures began to operate with crushing effect upon West India interests, we shall be in a position to judge how much truth there is in the cry that emancipation has ruined the British Colonies. The comparison embraces. a period during which the free-labor system had been in operation, and on its trial, seventeen years.

The table on the following page was compiled with the greatest possible care by R. Montgomery Martin, Esq., who was privileged with free access to government offices and official documents, while preparing his work on the colonies for the press.

. Facts constitute the most incontrovertible arguments; and here we have an elaborate array of facts, which, combined, shed a flood of light upon the much misrepresented subject of British emancipation, and show how little reliance is to be placed upon the random and unsupported assertions which have been so often and so boldly reiterated, as to the depopulation and depreciation of the colonies subsequent to the abolition of slavery.

The increase of population is a striking feature in this tabular statement. Previous to the act of emancipation the population of the slave colonies was decreasing in a ratio that was fearful to contemplate, and which in a few years would have left them without inhabitants. It was ascertained by means of the registration of slaves, which the home government insisted upon having maintained in all the West India islands, that during eleven years, ending with 1830, there was a decrease in the negro population amounting to 52,000, owing to excessive toil, under-feeding, and severity of discipline, their condition being, to use the words of a nobleman since at the head of the British government, the Earl of Derby, "one of unredressed injustice, bitter oppression, and hopeless wrong." It is not probable that this downward tendency of the colored population received a check all at once, immediately on the abolition of slavery, especially as the abuses of the apprenticeship system were of such a character as to make it little better than slavery itself, and left the infant portion of the laboring class so entirely unprovided for, and so absolutely dependent on their apprenticed parents, whose labor for five days in the week was given by law to the masters, as to render a very considerable mortality among them matter of certainty. But after the people became really free, in 1838, the natural laws of increase resumed their sway, and instead of a decrease of 52,000, we find an increase of population during the seventeen

Caymanas.

Totals..... 175,518 | 827,224 1,069,885 || £432,999 £715,729 £3,205,523 £4,737,295||3,646,366 3,408,627 5,109,975 5,061,602 686,794 473,091 473,091 651,698

*Not a sugar producing colony.