50 



FARMERS' REGISTER, 



[No. 1 



foreign plantations. These expectations (on the 

 strength whereof we understand that the prices 

 of slaves in Puerto Rico and the southern Uni- 

 ted States have already risen between 25 and 30 

 per cent.) have proceeded upon the very great 

 difference between tlie cost of producing sugar by 

 free and by slave-labor. In some parls of Gui- 

 ana. St. Vincent's, Trinidad, Mauritius, and Ja- 

 maica, the prime cost may probably be low e- 

 nough, by reason of the soil's fertility, the fiicili- 

 ties of carriage, and other local advantages, to 

 promise a continuance of the sugar-cro|)s (not- 

 withstanding the additional cost of Iree-labor), at 

 a price not too high to find some purchasers; but 

 on all the secondary class of estates, the cost of 

 production, under the added disadvantage of free 

 labor, must henceforth (unless relief can be gii;>°n 

 in some essential point, such as that of the restric- 

 tions on West Indian intercourse) be too heavy 

 to be remunerated at any price which, under the 

 present duty, the consumers, could permanently 

 pay. Nay, even granting the fullest relief from 

 restrictions, and admitting that, in general^ the 

 planter may be able to procure fi-ee labor provided 

 he give a liberal price for it, we cannot shut our 

 eyes to the certainty tliat there are very many 

 plantations which are too little productive to af- 

 ford, at best, anything like a fi'ee-labor price, and 

 which, in any conceivable circumstances, must 

 absolutely be abandoned; in fact, we can hardly 

 calculate this abandonment at a proportion so low 

 as one -sixth of the whole; which would exhibit a 

 discontinuance of production, to the extent of 38, 

 500 tons of the 231,000 now raised, being more 

 than the whole quantity of West Indian sugar 

 consumed in the markets of the European conti- 

 nent. On this aubject we invite particular atten- 

 tion to the simple matter-of-fact statements of 

 Mr. Innes in his Letter to Lord Glenelg— jaas- 

 sim. 



The first consequence then, of the recent abo- 

 lition of compulsory labor in our West Indies and 

 the Mautritius will be, and indeed already is, that 

 so much of the of the continental sugar-market 

 as those colonies were wont to supply must be fur- 

 nished fi'om the cheaper labor of the foreign slave 

 plantations; and of those supplies to the continent 

 so failing from the Britsh colonies the annual 

 amount is, we repeat, from thirty-five to forty 

 thousand tons. To this full extent, at all events, 

 and under any possible remissions, we must pre- 

 pare to see substhuted, for the comparatively mild 

 servitude of the British colonies, the oppressive 

 slavery of the foreign settlements, fed by the Af- 

 rican traffic; for East Indian sugai' being, as offi- 

 cial evidence has shown, by much too "costly to 

 compete on the continent with the slave-grown 

 produce of the foreign settlements, the case\s flxr 

 as concerns the continental su|)ply, seems wholly 

 incapable of the remedy. Still, while we pretend 

 not to deny that the English measure of emanci- 

 pation is attended with llie disadvantage of ma- 

 king room for a great deal of slave-grown sugar, 

 on the continent, let us not be understooif as 

 thence interring any blarne to our country. At 

 worst, she may have been a little too precipitate in 

 a right course. Her first duty was liik to be her 

 own reformation; and if that reformation has left 

 a wider scope for the covetousness and cruelty of 

 her neighbors, England, however she may lament 

 the misfortune, at least does not share- in the 

 crime. 



But though she be thus irresponsible as to the 

 supply which she is enabling the foreign slave- 

 colonies to export in her stead to the continent, her 

 responsibility for her own home-consumption is 

 clear and unqualified. If, on anj' pretext whate- 

 ver, political or commercial, whether to help her 

 revenue or to cheapen her purchases. Great Bri- 

 tain admit into her own market a single ton of su- 

 gar raised by a slave-importing colonj^, she is a 

 direct receiver in the felony, with more than the fe- 

 lon's guilt. There will then be renewed, /or her 

 profit, at Puerto Rico or Bahia, the suffering which 

 will have been vainly extinguished in Demerara 

 and Barbadoes; and on her, therefore, will he 

 again that load of injustice from which she has so 

 lately and painfully been shriven. We are fiirli-ora 

 understating the case — the suffering of" our negro 

 slaves had come, long before the Emancipation 

 Act passed, to be a mere name,in comparison with 

 what is likely to be substituted for it as the object 

 of our patronage and protection. 



Most plainly, unless some honest and firm in- 

 terposition come speedily to the aid of our own 

 West Indian negro, these flagrant results are but 

 too much to be dreaded, fiom the necessary 

 tendency of emancipation to produce one or other 

 of two effects — either a great augmentation in the 

 cost of production — or an abandonment of culti- 

 vation, not merelj' to the limited extent of the con- 

 tinental consumption, before mentioned, but gen- 

 erally throughout all the estates of secondary qual- 

 ity; that is, throughout more than half the British 

 plantations. The average annual expense of each 

 negro, including the cost of his dwelling and pro- 

 vision grounds, may be taken to have been, be- 

 fore the emancipation, about £6 sterling per head; 

 so that an estate possessing 300 negroes, and pro- 

 ducing 3300 cwts. of sugar, would have required, 

 in the item of negro labor, a yearly outlay of 

 about £1800, or lis. in the price of the cwt. 

 Even on the assumption, which we here adopt — 

 but which is still denied by the West Indians — 

 (and very streneously are they supported in their 

 view by the evidence of Mr. Innes) — viz. that wa- 

 ges will eventually induce the generally of the ne- 

 groes to voluntary labor — it is certainly not to be 

 expected that the wages for the daily number of 

 hours requisite to keep up the production, can ave- 

 rage less than a further annual sum of £5 ster- 

 ling per head. This will add £1500 to the whole 

 cost; being at the rate of 9s. and a fraction, in ad- 

 dition to the former lis. for each cwt. of the 3300; 

 so that, both during, and after the expiration 

 of, the apprenticeship, the labor, if attainable at 

 all, will be found, even on this calculation, (Avhich 

 is below ninepence a day for each negro on an 

 average of age, sex, health, and strength,) to cost 

 at least <£ 1 per cwt. of sugar, whereof somewhat 

 more than 9s. is a new charge, occasioned by the 

 emancipation. 



But sugar, in this country, has become one 

 of the necessaries of life; it has been rendered al- 

 most indispensable, even among the poorest class- 

 es, by their extensive consumption of tea and cof- 

 ftee. The admission of East Indian sugar, at a 

 duty reduced from its ))resent amount of 32s. per 

 cwt. to 24s., which latter is the amount of duty 

 paid on the sugar of the West Indies — even if 

 such an equalization unaccompanied by any coun- 

 tervailing relief to the West Indians from their 

 present commercial disadvantages under the Na- 



