46 TIMEHRI. 
reduces the natural advantages of the soil to a level with 
unprodu€tive and exhausted traéts by trebling the price 
of labour employed on it. And seeing that it is notorious 
that the Demerary planter, if he could procure lands at 
the same rate as the Island planter, could send his sugar 
into the market at one-half the expense, and completely 
drive out all the sugars of the foreign Colonies, it yet pre- 
fers to enrich the Governments of Brazil, the Havanah and 
the East, by restri€tions on the produétive powers of its 
own Colonies rather than by giving them a fair field for 
competition to command once more a monopoly of the 
colonial supply of Europe. 
It the alluvion of Demerary were cultivated at the 
same expense as other colonies, there is no other traét 
in any part of the known world, that could compete with 
it, for it could undersell them all one half, in the immense 
returns of its produce. This is evident, for though the 
restriction of the import of labourers has raised the price 
of labour to nearly three times its average value in other 
colonies, and the nett return of its produce is scarcely 
half that of the islands, yet does the crop, and the facili- 
ties of cultivation, enable the Demerary Planter suc- 
cessfully to compete with the other colonies, and the 
merchant finds his capital profitably employed, though 
obliged to advance more than double the amount, on the 
same means of cultivation; an estate of 500 negroes in 
Demerary scarcely being purchaseable for £100,000 
though in the islands not worth £50,000. 
However politic it may be therefore to preserve the 
population and cultivation of the islands in their present 
state, it is done at the sacrifice of the commercial 
independence of England and it introduces and main- 
