106 



NO SMALL ESTATES, 



tempt anything else, the negroes must learn how to do the 

 work, and the white superintendents are generally too 

 ignorant, too lazy, or too indifferent, to take the trouble to 

 teach them. To cultivate either of the great staples, it has 

 always been esteemed necessary to have very expensive 

 works attached to each estate, costing generally from ten 

 to forty or fifty thousand pounds. I have seen sugar works 

 here which cost sixty thousand pounds. Of course their 

 expense does not increase in proportion to the size 

 of the property ; on the contrary, like the expenses of 

 superintendence, it costs but little more for machinery to 

 manufacture the sugar and the rum for an estate of two 

 hundred acres, than for one five times its size. Hence it is 

 supposed that the value of a large estate, would be impaired 

 by dividing it, and that the larger it is, the greater is its 

 worth per acre. I shall have occasion to show by-and-by 

 how entirely wrong the planters are in their facts, and in 

 their inferences upon this subject, but it is enough at pre- 

 sent for me to state, what will not be disputed, that the 

 whole proprietorship of the island is infected with the im- 

 pression, that the real estate is valuable in an inverse ratio to 

 the number of proprietors ; that the more simple the kind 

 of labor required, the greater will be its product, and that 

 sugar, rum and coffee, can be produced on that account, 

 more profitably than anything else. 



Hence it happens that when a proprietor sells a property, 



