STATISTICAL ESTIMATES. 235 



when the slave-trade shall be really abolished, and not 

 merely according to the laws, as since 1820, respecting the 

 impossibility of continuing the cultivation of sugar on a 

 large scale, and respecting the approaching time when the 

 agricultural industry of Cuba shall be restrained to plan- 

 tations of coffee and tobacco, and the breeding of cattle, are 

 founded on arguments which do not appear to me to be per- 

 fectly just. Instead of indulging in gloomy presages, the 

 planters would do well to wait till the government shall have 

 procured positive statistical statements. The spirit in which 

 even very old enumerations were made, for instance that of 

 1775, by the distinction of age, sex, race, and state of civil 

 liberty, deserves high commendation. Nothing but the 

 means of execution were wanting. It was felt that the inha- 

 bitants were powerfully interested in knowing partially the 

 occupations of the blacks, and their numerical distribution in 

 the sugar-settlements, farms, and towns. To remedy evil, 

 to avoid public danger, to console the misfortunes of a suf- 

 fering race, who are feared more than is acknowledged, the 

 wound must be probed ; for in the social body, when go- 

 verned by intelligence, there is found, as in organic bodies, a 

 repairing force, which may be opposed to the most inve- 

 terate evils. 



In the year 1811 the municipality and the Tribunal oi 

 Commerce of the Havannah computed the total population 

 of the island of Cuba to be 600,000, including 326,000 people 

 of colour, free or slaves, mulattos or blacks. At that time, 

 nearly three-fifths of the people of colour resided in the 

 jurisdiction of the Havannah, from Cape Saint Antonio to 

 Alvarez. In this part it appears that the towns contained 

 as many mulattos and free negroes as slaves, but that the 

 coloured population of the towns was to that of the fields as 

 two to three. In the eastern part of the island, on the 

 contrary, from Alvarez to Santiago de Cuba and Cape May si, 

 the men of colour inhabiting the towns, nearly equalled in 

 number those scattered in the farms. From 1811 till tho 

 end of 1825, the island of Cuba has received along the 

 whole extent of its coast, by lawful and unlawful means, 

 1^-j.OOO African blacks, of whom the custom-house of the 

 Havannah only, registered, from 1811 to 1820, about 116,000. 

 This newly introduced mass has no doubt been spread more 



