do so with a voice that could make itself well heard, and should dare to do so in Jamaica.

Men there are generally tolerant of opinion on most matters, and submit to be talked to on their own shortcomings and colonial mismanagement with a decent grace. You may advise them to do this, and counsel them to do that, referring to their own immediate concerns, without receiving that rebuke which your interference might probably deserve. But do not try their complaisance too far. Do not advise them to give over making sugar. If you give such advice in a voice loud enough to be heard, the island will soon be too hot to hold you. Sugar is loved there, whether wisely loved or not. If not wisely, then too well.

When I hear a Jamaica planter talking of sugar, I cannot but think of Burns, and his muse that had made him poor and kept him so. And the planter is just as ready to give up his canes as the poet was to abandon his song.

The production of sugar and the necessary concomitant production of rum-for in Jamaica the two do necessarily go together-is not, one would say, an alluring occupation. I do not here intend to indulge my readers with a detailed description of the whole progress, from the planting or ratooning of the cane till the sugar and the rum are shipped. Books there are, no doubt, much wiser than mine in which the whole process is developed. But I would wish this much to be understood, that the sugar planter, as things at present are, must attend to and be master of, and practically carry out three several trades. He must be an agriculturist, and grow his cane; and like all agriculturists must take his crop from the ground and have it ready for use; as the wheat grower does in England, and the cotton grower in America. But then he must also be a manufacturer, and that in a branch of man

ufacture which requires complicated machinery. The wheat grower does not grind his wheat and make it into bread. Nor does the cotton grower fabricate calico. But the grower of canes must make sugar. He must have his boiling-houses and trash-houses; his water power and his steam power; he must dabble in machinery, and, in fact, be a Manchester manufacturer as well as a Kent farmer. And then, over and beyond this, he must be a distiller. The sugar leaves him fit for your puddings, and the rum fit for your punch-always excepting the slight article of adulteration which you are good enough to add afterwards yourselves. Such a complication of trades would not be thought very alluring to a gentleman farmer in England.

And yet the Jamaica proprietor holds faithfully by his sugar-canes.

It has been said that sugar is an article which for its proper production requires slave labor. That this is absolutely so is certainly not the fact, for very good sugar is made in Jamaica without it. That thousands of pounds could be made with slaves where only hundreds are made -or, as the case may be, are lost-without it, I do not doubt. The complaint generally resolves itself to this, that free labor in Jamaica cannot be commanded; that it cannot be had always, and up to a certain given quantity at a certain moment; that labor is scarce, and therefore high priced, and that labor being high priced, a negro can live on half a day's wages, and will not therefore work the whole day-will not always work any part of the day at all, seeing that his yams, his breadfruit, and his plantains are ready to his hands. But the slaves!-Oh! those were the good times!

I have in another chapter said a few words about the negroes as at present existing in Jamaica, I also shall say

a few words as to slavery elsewhere; and I will endeavor not to repeat myself. This much, however, is at least clear to all men, that you cannot eat your cake and have it. You cannot abolish slavery to the infinite good of your souls, your minds, and intellects, and yet retain it for the good of your pockets. Seeing that these men are free, it is worse than useless to begrudge them the use of their freedom. If I have means to lie in the sun and meditate idle, why, O my worthy taskmaster! should you expect me to pull out at thy behest long reels of cotton, long reels of law jargon, long reels of official verbosity, long reels of gossamer literature-Why, indeed? Not having means so to lie, I do pull out the reels, taking such wages as I can get, and am thankful. But my friend and brother over there, my skin-polished, shining, oil-fat negro, is a richer man than I. He lies under his mango-tree, and eats the luscious fruit in the sun; he sends his black urchin up for a breadfruit, and behold the family table is spread. He pierces a cocoa-nut, and, lo! there is his beverage. He lies on the grass surrounded by oranges, bananas, and pine-apples. Oh, my hard taskmaster of the sugar-mill, is he not better off than thou? why should he work at thy order? "No, massa, me weak in me belly; me no workee to-day; me no like workee just 'em little moment." Yes, Sambo has learned to have his own way; though hardly learned to claim his right without lying.

That this is all bad-bad nearly as bad can be-bad perhaps as anything short of slavery, all men will allow. It will be quite as bad in the long run for the negro as for the white man-worse, indeed; for the white man will by degrees wash his hands of the whole concern. But as matters are, one cannot wonder that the black man will not work. The question stands thus: cannot he be made to do so? Can it not be contrived that he shall be free,

free as is the Englishman, and yet compelled, as is the Englishman, to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow?

I utterly disbelieve in statistics as a science, and am never myself guided by any long-winded statement of figures from a Chancellor of the Exchequer or such like bigwig. To my mind it is an hallucination. Such statements are "ignes fatui." Figures, when they go beyond six in number, represent to me not facts, but dreams, or sometimes worse than dreams. I have therefore no right myself to offer statistics to the reader. But it was stated in the census taken in 1844 that there were sixteen thousand white people in the island, and about three hundred thousand blacks. There were also about seventy thousand colored people. Putting aside for the moment the latter as a middle class, and regarding the black as the free servants of the white, one would say that labor should not be so deficient. But what, if your free servants don't work; unfortunately know how to live without working?

The political question that presses upon me in viewing Jamaica, is certainly this-Will the growth of sugar pay in Jamaica, or will it not? I have already stated my conviction that a change is now taking place in the very blood and nature of the men who are destined to be the dominant classes in these western tropical latitudes. That the white man, the white Englishman, or white English Creole, will ever again be a thoroughly successful sugar grower in Jamaica I do not believe. That the brown man may be so is very probable; but great changes must first be made in the countries around him.

While the " peculiar institution" exists in Cuba, Brazil, Porto Rico and the Southern States, it cannot, I think, come to pass. A plentiful crop in Cuba may in any year bring sugar to a price which will give no return

whatever to the Jamaica grower. A spare crop in Jamaica itself will have the same result; and there are many causes for spare crops; drought, for instance, and floods, and abounding rats, and want of capital to renew and manure the plants. At present the trade will only give in good years a fair profit to those who have purchased their lands almost for nothing. A trade that cannot stand many misfortunes can hardly exists prosperously. This trade has stood very many; but I doubt whether it can stand more.

The "peculiar institution," however, will not live for ever. The time must come when abolition will be popular even in Louisiana. And when it is law there, it will be the law in Cuba also. If that day shall have arrived before the last sugar-mill in the island shall have been stopped, Jamaica may then compete with other free countries. The world will not do without sugar, let it be produced by slaves or free men.

But though a man may venture to foretell the abolition of slavery in the States, and yet call himself, no prophet, he must be a wiser man than I who can foretell the time. It will hardly be to-morrow; nor yet the next day. It will scarcely come so that we may see it. Before it does come it may easily be that the last sugarmill in poor Jamaica will in truth have stopped.