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a combination against the authorities. In Trinidad, one negro was hanged, and a few others sentenced to hard labor; in St. Christopher's, four or five were transported for life. In only one colony was martial law proclaimed; nor have there since been any serious outbreaks among the negroes, though this is the twenty-eighth year of their freedom. Yet, in Jamaica alone, from 1800-32, there had been five insurrections, of which the last, in the winter of 1831-32, cost the lives of 500 negroes, and involved a destruction of property, amounting to six or seven millions. of dollars. Peace, therefore, was the first effect of Freedom.

So much for the fears of murder and pillage entertained by the colonists. The second great evil which they feared, was a complete cessation of labor, or such irregularity as to derange all the operations of business. In some colonies, and especially in Jamaica, this fear has been partly realized; in others, as in Antigua, Barbadoes, the Bahamas, nothing of the kind has occurred. Now as the same cause ought always to produce the same effect, may we not suspect that the diminution of labor in Jamaica and elsewhere, is due to other causes than the emancipation of the laborer? At any rate, may we not find some other reason for it, than the native idleness of the negro, of which Mr. Carlyle and a host of shallowers writes, say so much? May it not spring from a feeling which the Anglo-Saxon of all men ought to respect, since he has so much of it,—Earth-hunger— a desire to own land, and not to be the servant of another man? A committee of the House of Commons in 1842, asserted that this was the case. They said:

"Labor has diminished because the blacks have devoted themselves to work more profitable for them than field work, and because they have generally been able, especially in the larger colonies, to purchase lands without difficulty, to live comfortably, and enrich themselves without being obliged to give the planters more than three or four days of seven hours in each week. The low price of land, the ill-will of the planters, the harshness of the laws which establish the relation between the laborer and his employer.— these have been the chief causes of the difficulties experienced."^[1]

To the same effect, Francis Hincks, Governor-in-Chief of the Windward Islands, said in 1859;^[2] "There has been a considerable withdrawal of labor from sugar cultivation, in Jamaica. Among the causes, next to the tenure of land, the insolvency of the proprietors has been the chief. The only wonder is, that with such a land tenure as exists in the West Indies, a single laborer remains on the sugar estates.' Mr. Sewell, a Canadian by birth, now an American citizen, who visited Jamaica in 1860, and who has written a book of high value, on the Labor Question in the West Indies,^[3] speaks in the same tone; "All the impartial testimony that I could obtain in Jamaica," he says, "summed up a crushing contradiction to the unqualified pretension of the planter, that the negro would not work. And when I asked the negro himself, why he preferred the toil of the mine (eight hours in the day and six days in the week) to the comparatively easy labor of the plantation, his explanation was very simple- 'Buckra don't pay.'" Be it remembered that Mr. Sewell is no abolitionist.

But let us see how great is the evil complained of. Certainly if idleness has increased in the British colonies, it will show itself by diminished imports and exports; for the foreign and domestic trade of a country is the sure index of its industry. First let us consider the sugar erop alone, in which the alleged diminution has been greatest. There is no doubt that the sugar crop of Jamaica, and of several of the other colonies, has much decreased since emancipation. But it must not be forgotten that this decrease began so long ago as 1807, and continued steadily until 1858, when it seemed to be checked, and there is now, we are told, a slight gain. We must bear in mind, too. that the negroes in Jamaica have decreased, since 1807, nearly twenty per cent., and that the sugar monopoly, which the colonies enjoyed has been entirely superseded by the modern English theories of Free Trade, while the planters have been all this time in a state of chronic bankruptcy, far worse than the financial condition of our Southern States. Remembering all these things, we find by the sure evidence of Arithmetic that all the British sugar colonies produced, during the four last years of slavery, a yearly average of 4 377 971 ewt; in the four years of ap-

1. ↑ See Cochin's Abolition de l'Escleroge. Tome 1. p. 401. We have translated from the French, not having access to the Blue Book in question.
2. ↑ See Anti-Slavery Standard (N. Y.) Sept. 24, 1859, for a report of this speech, made at London. Aug. 1st, 1859.
3. ↑ The ordeal of Free Labor in the British West Indies, By Wm. G Sewell. N. Y., 1861. p. 285.