250 TIMEHRI. 
— 
A Coffee estate of the same strength, worth about 
£45,000, may make too,ooolbs. of Coffee annually, or 
about £5,000, but the crops being very uncertain Coffee 
estates are generally longer in clearing themselves than 
Sugar properties. 
Cotton, in the earlier period of the colony, when the 
front salt lands were new and the plant gave a great 
comparative return, was for the first 10 years a very 
lucrative cultivation, requiring little expense beyond the 
first purchase of the negroes, and those negroes bought 
at 4 the present price. In the present day however with 
the value of the article so much reduced, and those parts 
of the soil most favorable for its growth exhausted, the 
purchaser of a cotton Estate involves himself in certain 
ruin. However desirable the abolition of the slave trade 
might have been on the score of humanity, it entails 
upon the mother country the certainty of losing the 
command of one of the principal staples of her manu- 
faGture. And for the future she will be dependent on 
America or other States for a supply of that article which 
it would ruin her own colonists to cultivate ; the British 
Government can never keep a cotton colony in its pos- 
session till it reduces the price of negroes to something 
less than £100 a head, as under present circumstances 
it would otherwise never pay its expenses. 
There is no country within the tropics so favorable 
for grazing as this. The immense savannahs and waste | 
or deserted lands preserve a constant supply of the finest 
herbage for cattle, particularly oxen. The beef and 
mutton, though not so fat, are equal in flavour to the 
best European. And the rapidity with which cattle 
increase when the least attention is paid to them, proves 
