LABOR NOT CAPITAL* 



I'll 



caste. Where slavery exists, there are but two classes, the 

 capitalist and the slave. The union of capital and labor 

 in the same person never occurs. The consequence is, 

 that in Jamaica where the moral influence of slavery 

 yet abides, there are none of those small proprietors, so 

 common throughout the northern part of the United 

 States, who, with the savings from their daily wages, buy 

 a few acres of land, which they cultivate with their own 

 hands, enlarging from time to time as convenience will 

 permit, and on which they raise a large proportion of the 

 articles required for their family consumption. Had Ja- 

 maica such a population, we would never hear again of 

 her importing annually seventy thousand barrels of flour, 

 ninety thousand bushels of corn, three hundred thousand 

 pounds of tobacco, ten or twelve million feet of lumber and 

 sawed stuff ; her population would not have to pay thirty- 

 eight cents a pound for butter, eighteen cents a quart for 

 milk, three to five cents a piece for eggs, twenty-five cents 

 a pound for ham, and sixteen to eighteen dollars for a 

 barrel of flour. But as I have before stated, slavery and 

 absenteeism together, have distributed the land in princely 

 tracts to large capitalists, whose interest has always been 

 supposed to be best consulted, by cultivating two or three 

 leading staples, to the general neglect of all articles of 

 home consumption, and by whom the multiplication of 

 small land proprietors has never been favored. It is not 



