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 COMPARATIVE CONDITION OF THE BRITISH WESTERN SLAVE COLONIES IN 1833-4 (AT THE PERIOD OF THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY) AND IN 1851-2. Population. 1884. 1852. 1888. 1852. 1833. 1852. 47,246 144,656 56,178 93,381 60 500 629 * 104,164 Guiana..... 100,000 92,943 130,000 70,512 169,870 674,817 855,419 71,828 47,372 63,593 30,310 25,763 5,473 7,160 7,605 12,046 Honduras.. 62,000 6,500 10,000 15,175 17,964 235,156 Bay Islands.. 30 1,500 Jamaica.... 6,400 365,368 465,000 400 199,623 209,379 765,400 14,018 22,532 500 67,971 105,968. 1,930 493 5,509 4,441 6,312 5,937 1,524 1,893 8,266 8,700 42,217 50,436 14,592 11,758 17,671 22,066 10,774 3,172 4,595 5,973 12,712 10,025 89,206 143,687 48,650 26,310|| 29,210 29,246 225 80,717 91,344 115,097 37,403 62,178 63,884 86,527 68,352 232,622 186,849 15,070 1,181 12,413 8,848 4,417 14,969 161 4,279 8,557 3,534 Totals.....175,513 827,224 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. years, of more than 242,000. It is true there has been immigration from various quarters to some of the colonies, but not to such an extent as materially to affect this increase, when the great mortality among the emigrants themselves, and the return of many of them to their own country according to contract, are taken into the account. A large proportion of all who have been carried to the several colonies have been speedily removed by death, while others, having fulfilled the specified term of service, have gone back to India to spend their hoarded earnings in their native land, so that the increase of population is not largely affected by immigration. Cholera, too, has done its work and swept away large numbers, especially in Jamaica, where it raged with terrible fury in 1849; and the number of whites has been lessened in most of the islands, for their services are no longer required as overseers, book-keepers, ete., to the same extent as under the former system, and their places are, in many instances, filled by colored men. Not a few of the estates that once had several white men to superintend their operations, are now efficiently managed by black or colored overseers. The condition of the public revenue, and the ability of the people to bear taxation, must be regarded as an important element in the general question of a country's commercial and financial condition. The revenues of the several emancipated colonies are, to a very considerable extent, raised by import duties, and it will be observed that the gross annual amount for the whole of the colonies advanced between 1833-4 and 1851-2 from £432,999 to £715,729. The conclusion is inevitable that a vast improvement must have taken place in the circumstances of the people, when they are able to bear this large additional amount of taxation, levied chiefly upon those articles. the consumption of which contributes to promote a higher degree of comfort and social enjoyment among all classes of the community. The amount and character of the imports furnish an unmistakable criterion by which to estimate the advancing or decreasing prosperity of a country; and in the emancipated colonies we find these to have increased, at the end of seventeen years, in annual value, from £3,205,523 to £4,737,295, more than a million and a half sterling, or about seven and a half million dollars. If those representations which have been so freely circulated concerning the sinking condition of the West Indies, the indolence of the people, and a prevailing and increasing barbarism, have any truth in them, how, we ask, does it come to pass that these very people are in a condition to require, and have the means of purchasing, British and American productions and manufactures to the extent of seven and a half million dollars per annum above what were imported in the palmy days of slavery? And it so happens that these imports are largely of such a character as to indicate the growing comfort and advancing civilization of the consumers. For instance, comparing the three last years of slavery with the three years ending December, 1851, the increase in the article of plain and colored calicoes, imported into the colonies, amounted to seventy-one million seven hundred and sixteen thousand, five hundred and ninety-five yards; and this, notwithstanding Jamaica had ceased to be, what it formerly was, the entrepôt of a large and luerative trade in such articles with the Spanish main, which trade is now carried on direct from England. It appears that Jamaica alone, in 1850, consumed six million yards of plain and printed cottons more than were imported into all the slave colonies together in 1830. On a comparison between the year preceding the abolition of slavery and 1850, the imports show an increase of 23,471 barrels of flour, 5,553 barrels of meal, 377,872 pounds of bread, 1,835,624 pounds of rice, 58,500 bushels of corn, oats, peas, etc.; and salt fish, salt pork, soap, butter, lard, and other articles in like proportions. Such facts supply, of themselves, a satisfactory refutation of the assertion that the emancipated negroes, refusing to work for wages, content themselves with those fruits and edibles which their own small freeholds afford them, and are sinking into squalid poverty and barbarism. Had it been really so, they would only have been acting out the lesson which they had been compelled to learn during slavery; but instead of this we see them obtaining by industry, on an enlarged scale, the means and appliances of improving civilization and comfort, and opening up profitable markets to British manufacturers and American merchants. The shipping inward has increased, as a matter of course, in proportion to the imports, being in 1833 473,091 tons, and in 1851 651,698 tons, an advance of about forty per cent. This is another feature which indicates improvement, not decline. It is not to be supposed that either British or American merchants send their ships to countries where they do not find profitable employment; and if these emancipated colonies require upward of 178,000 tons of shipping more than they did in the times of slavery, as shown in the tabular statement, what an amount of ignorance, or contempt of truth, is involved in the assertion that they are going to ruin. While we are on this subject a remark or two concerning Hayti may not be out of place. It is often affirmed that Hayti has been ruined since the violent struggle which ended in the abolition of slavery there; an assertion which is not borne out by facts. Mr. R. M. Martin says: "The population speaking the Spanish language is now estimated at 125,000, the majority being a mixed or colored race; and those speaking the French language 800,000, more than seven-eighths of whom are of pure African blood. All enjoy a degree of comfort adapted to their climate, and equal to that of the peasantry of other countries. Sugar culture has been destroyed, lest it might tempt the whites to endeavor to restore slavery. They produce annually about seventy million pounds of coffee, and export large quantities of this and other articles. In the year ending June, 1851, the Haytian trade employed 74,671 tons of American shipping, navigated by 3,504 United States seamen, and also a considerable amount of foreign tonnage. The imports of Haytian produce into the United States in 1851 were 1,889,968 dollars; and the exports in return, 1,816,298 dollars." With regard to the export of staple productions, as exhibited in the foregoing table, some explanatory remarks are necessary to a just conclusion. In 1833 the navigation laws of Great Britain were in force, which to a large extent shut out foreign shipping from the West Indies, and compelled the planters to send all their produce to British ports; so that the columns of exports headed 1833 exhibit the entire produce of the articles named in all the colonies at that period. Not so with the columns headed 1852, for then the navigation laws had been repealed, enabling the West Indians to buy in the cheapest, and to sell their sugar, molasses, and rum in the dearest markets they could find; and it is a well-known fact that considerable quantities of these articles find entrance to the United States, and other foreign markets, probably more than sufficient to cover the apparent decrease exhibited in the table of exports we have quoted. There are numerous mercantile houses, all over the West India colonies, which import largely from the United States and British America, and send back for payment, in whole or in part, their saccharine productions, of which, as a matter of course, no account is taken in the "exports to the United Kingdom." It should also be observed, that since the abolition of slavery the social and domestic habits of the people have been improved, and the home consumption of all the staple articles of produce has been largely augmented. Sugar, molasses, and coffee, from the ordinary use of which, while they were slaves, the people were cut off, are now in general and daily requisition among them; so that, allowing only for a very moderate quantity to be consumed by each individual, the increase in the domestic consumption would of itself go far to make up all the apparent deficiency between 1833 and 1852. It is not practicable to show with accuracy the amount of sugar, molasses, etc., now made in the West Indies; but the facts which have been referred to lead to the conclusion that, even at the time when the planting and commercial interests of the colonies were at the lowest point of depression-about 1851-2-a larger quantity of |