84 Timehri. 



VI. 



Immigration statistics give the following as the number of African 

 Immigrants after Freedom : — 



Forward ... 10,346 Total ... 13,264 

 In 1891 the number of native Africans in the Colony was 3,433. By 

 April 2, 1911 — the date of the last Census — the " Salt Waters " had 

 dwindled to 706. " There is no medicine against old age." 



Why did African Immigration — never conspicuously successful — 

 at length fail ? 



First of all, its main source — happily — dried up. There was no 

 longer a supply of Liberated Africans. Stringent and ever more stringent 

 Treaties killed slave-smuggling. It no longer paid, and so went out. In 

 1870-1, respectively, the first steps were taken towards the emancipation 

 of the negroes in Cuba and Brazil. No longer could the cane-fields of 

 Guiana be tilled by blacks rescued from the holds of Spanish or Brazilian 

 slave-ships. There was an end to that supply. 



And with this source — happily for the world — gone, African Immigra- 

 tion itself collapsed. Free immigrants had been few from the beginning. 

 There was an obvious and natural prejudice against leaving Africa for 

 the West Indies, in the mind of the Negro. The West 

 Indies were too intimately and lately associated with 

 slavery. A ship and the white man could be connected 

 with nothing else. It was impossible to persuade the black man to any 

 contrary belief. No, emigration meant going across the big water to 

 slavery. The old belief that they were being taken away to be eaten 

 yet agitated the Liberated African Yard. Some of the Kongo 

 thought their blood would be used to dye the soldiers' coat3. Free emigra- 

 tion in such circumstances could hardly thrive. 



And what the black man felt in Africa the white man thought in 

 London. 



The black man feared slavery at the American end. 



The white man feared slave-trading at the African end, and so 

 imposed restrictions which the planter thought unnecessary but which 

 in the circumstances were probably wise and unavoidable. 



