For other proofs of the same nature we must again refer our readers to the article from which most, although by no means the whole, of those we have given have been taken. We may be asked why we have left Jamaica out of our account. The reason is plain. While we write, we are in hourly expectation of the Report of the Royal Commissioners sent to inquire into the particulars and the causes of the miserable tragedy of last winter. That report, we trust, will throw much light upon the whole state of society in Jamaica, as well as upon the details of the late outbreak and the proceedings which followed it. We therefore postpone all reference to recent events. To some statements about the state of things in Jamaica sixteen years back we shall have occasion to refer.

Mr. Baker, of course, is not bound to believe the evidence we have already quoted, and which might be extended to a much larger amount. We infer from several passages that he has never been in the West Indies. Still, if he thinks he knows more about them than men who have specially devoted their attention to their past history and present condition; and in particular more than the whole series of Governors who have resided on them during the last five-and-thirty years, he has a full right to his opinion. Let him evolve (more Germanico) out of his "internal consciousness," a detailed account of what the emancipated slaves of the West Indies must necessarily be and do, taking for his data what he saw of the negro savage in central Africa. We shall only remark that he himself might think it a little queer, if a West Indian Governor, founding his opinion upon his own experience of negroes in Barbadoes, should positively contradict his statements as to what he saw upon the shores of the Albert Nyanza. Still he will have a right to his theory. But he has no right to do what he has done which is simply to pass over without notice all the evidence which exists upon the subject, and to assert, without any attempt at proof, as if it were a fact admitted by all men alike: "In this state of slavery the negro was compelled to work. He was suddenly freed; and from that moment he refused to work." "As the negro was originally imported as a labourer and now refuses to labour, it is self-evident he is a lamentable failure." The fact we believe to be that he really thought it was a matter on which all men were agreed. The assumption is made commonly enough in English society, chiefly, we believe, upon the authority of the Times, which systematically asserts it as an unquestioned fact, that the West Indian colonies were flourishing up to the time of emancipation; that we sacrificed their prosperity to a sentimental horror of slavery; that ever since emancipation they have been raVOL. VII.-NO. XIII. [New Series.]

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pidly declining, simply because the negroes refuse to work; that the negroes themselves have during these thirty years been growing daily more and more barbarous and wretched; that their present condition is tenfold worse, in all respects, than it was under slavery; and that the only hope of any good for them, or any prosperity for the West Indies, is in a system in which they shall be compelled to work by coercive laws. That this is a fair account of the opinions represented by the Times on the subject of the negroes of the West Indies will be questioned by none of its readers, hardly we think by the writers themselves. The greater part of the London papers follow suit. For instance, as soon as a report reached England last November that an insurrection had taken place in Jamaica, and before it was even pretended that anything more than this had been reported, the mass of the London newspapers rushed to the conclusion that it was a negro conspiracy "for the gratification of revenge, rapine, and lust" (we quote the words of the Times); and proceeded to enlarge upon the imaginary fact that wages were far higher in Jamaica than in England, and work abundant; and that if the negroes were in any distress it was only because they preferred starvation to work.

This notion about the enormous and exorbitant wages demanded by the Jamaica negroes has been founded chiefly upon a well known paper of Carlyle, published some twenty years back, in which he describes the Jamaica negro as "sunk up to the ears in pumpkin, imbibing saccharine juices, and much at his ease in creation, and saying, 'Higher wages, Massa; higher, still higher,' till no conceivable opulence of cane crop will cover such wages." Mr. Carlyle does not think it necessary to state what these wages were or what the price of living. Upon these subjects we would refer the reader to a little book, called "Jamaica in 1850, by John Bigelow." The author is an intelligent American (we believe the same now Minister of the United States at Paris); he devotes a chapter to "Labour and Wages," and shows in detail, first, that the prices of all the necessaries of life in Jamaica were very considerably higher than in England. For instance :-butter, 1s. 64d. a pound; cow's milk, 94d. a quart; goat's milk, 1s. d.; American cheese, 1s. d.; English cheese, 1s. 7d.; potatoes, 34d. a pound; eggs, 34d. a couple (and during the Christmas holidays 24d. a piece); flour, from 68s. to 72s. 6d. a barrel. Next, that wages were never more and often less than six shillings a week, the labourer finding board and lodging. He justly infers that upon such wages life could not be supported in Jamaica. Meanwhile, land was abundant and at low prices.

He ascertained that the number of black proprietors (in 1850 be it remembered) was already "considerably over 100,000, and constantly increasing;" that of these "seven-tenths had been born in slavery and had spent many years of their lives in bondage;" he adds ::

"Upon their little tracts they raise, not only what they require for their own consumption, but a surplus which they take to market, usually in small panniers, upon donkeys, or upon their heads. Nearly every coloured proprietor has a donkey, which costs from seven to ten pounds, upon which he packs his produce, and under the custody, sometimes of a woman, often of a child, he sends it to town to be converted into money, with which he purchases such articles of necessity or luxury as his land does not produce, and he can afford. One of the most interesting spectacles to be witnessed about Kingston is presented on the high road, through which the market people, with their donkeys, in the cool of the morning, pour into the city from the back country. They form an almost uninterrupted procession four or five miles in length, and what strikes the eye of an American at once is their perfect freedom from care. Of course it requires no little self-denial and energy for a negro, upon the wages now paid in Jamaica, to lay up enough with which to purchase one of these properties; but if he does get one, he never parts with it, except for a larger or better. The planters call them lazy for indulging in this feeling of independence."

Mr. Carlyle wrote, near twenty years ago, "Pumpkins are not the sole pre-requisite for human well-being." "Many other things grow among these islands useful to man, such as sugar, coffee, cinnamon, and precious spices, things far nobler than pumpkins, and leading towards commerce, arts, politics, and social developments, which alone are the noble product, where men (and not pigs and pumpkins) are the parties concerned;" and then went on:-"Quashee, if he will not help in bringing out the spices, will get himself made a slave again (which state will be a little less ugly than his present one), and with beneficent whip, since other methods avail not, will be compelled to work." It is to be regretted that Mr. Carlyle does not sometimes ask himself whether the power of expressing himself in forcible language is a sufficient substitute for taking a little trouble to acquaint himself with the subject of which he speaks. Much as he reviles "shams," he is here the basest of shams himself. The whole question depends simply on facts, and he lays down the law in complete ignorance and defiance of facts which he might easily have learned. He calls for a "beneficent whip" for his fellow men

solely because he prefers to save himself the trouble of ascertaining facts, and guesses them, when with a little trouble he might learn them. The fact was that when he wrote (our readers will observe that we say nothing of late events or their causes) a Jamaica negro could earn a great deal more by labouring on a small plot of his own than by working for wages. We are far from considering this a good and satisfactory state of things. For many reasons we should have preferred the opposite. But a thoroughly bad social system which the Jamaica negro did not cause and could not cure, made it, in fact, impossible. A wise legislature would have adopted measures by which capital would have been attracted to the cultivation of the soil. It would then have paid better to the large proprietor to give a high price for good labour rather than a very low price for bad labour; the character of the labour to be had would gradually have improved. Such changes require time; for God has so made the world and the nature of man, that, in any nation and under any clime, those who have once got into a bad social system find it very hard to get out of it, and can succeed only by degrees. But it will only make bad worse to cut the matter short, as Mr. Carlyle proposed, by restoring slavery and "the beneficent whip" as the stimulus to labour, instead of wages-an idea which Mr. Baker expresses in milder words (meaning, in fact, the same), when he says the negro "must be compelled to work by some stringent law against vagrancy."

Mr. Baker may, perhaps, plead that the facts are notorious. The slave colonies were flourishing, and their prosperity was sacrificed by the emancipation of the negro. If by "notorious" he means only that the assertion is commonly repeated, what says is true-in any other sense it is simply false.

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The simple fact is that, even in an economical point of view, as a question of mere money, the abolition of slavery was no loss, but a gain to the colonies. To some of the colonies the abolition of the African slave-trade was a great loss. But the slave-trade no one in England now defends. Where the quantity of rich virgin soil at the disposal of the planter is practically unlimited, slavery fed by an active slave-trade does pay; because it pays to take in new soil by slave labour, to exhaust the soil, and work out the slaves by a rough and prodigal method of cultivation; and, when both are exhausted, to abandon the old plantation, and take in new lands by the labour of new slaves. Except under these conditions, slave labour does not pay. But there were some British colonies, especially Trinidad and British Guiana, in which this was actually going on before the abolition of the

slave-trade, and might have been continued on a large scale if the slave-trade had not been abolished. In the great majority of the West India Islands, on the other hand, the whole soil, or, at least, all that was suited for sugar cultivation, was under cultivation before the abolition of the slave-trade. If the slave-trade had not been abolished, and if the old system had been continued, by which the colonies had the monopoly of the British market (foreign sugars being excluded), and were forbidden to trade with other countries, the result would have been, that sugar cultivation by slave labour would have been enormously developed in Guiana and Trinidad, and that those colonies would have prospered greatly at the expense of a terrible amount of oppression and national guilt. The older colonies, such as Barbadoes, would have suffered severely from the competition, because they had no means of transferring the cultivation to new and unexhausted lands. The total pecuniary result, therefore, of the abolition of the slave-trade was that the nation, as a whole, sacrificed a good deal, while, of the colonies, some gained by abolition, and others lost a degree of prosperity they would otherwise have obtained.

But the slave-trade no one now defends; and given the abolition of the trade, it is certain that all the colonies gained by the abolition of slavery. We are still speaking merely of the money question. Mr. Baker is pleased to say: "In his state of slavery, the negro was compelled to work, and through his labour every country prospered where he had been introduced." The fact is, that if we take any one date before the abolition of slavery, we shall find that complaints of distress among the West Indian proprietors were as prevalent as they have been since. Let us give one quotation:

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"Lord Chandos, in 1830, presented a petition from the West India merchants and planters, setting forth the extreme distress under which they labour,' and he declared in his speech, that it was not possible for them to bear up against such a pressure any longer.' 'They are reduced to a state in which they are obliged earnestly to solicit relief from Parliament.' Mr. Bright said, 'The distress of the West India colonial body is unparalleled in any country. Many families who formerly lived in comparative affluence are reduced to absolute penury.' The West India Reporter also quotes a report on the commercial state of the West Indies, which said, 'There are the strongest concurrent testimonies and proofs that unless some speedy and efficient measures of relief are adopted, the ruin of a great number of the planters must inevitably very soon take place.' Meanwhile, production was