CENTRAL MILLS. 



145 



Mr. Stanley seems for a moment to have mistaken the 

 side of this question which he was professing to advocate, 

 or else he has proved quite too much for his purpose. If 

 small farms around a central mill cannot be made profita- 

 ble, because the canes, if not taken at once to the mill are 

 spoilt, then how is it that the present princely estates, into 

 which the island is divided, many of which contain over 

 3,000 acres a piece, are enabled to crop and manufacture 

 their sugar with only a single mill to each of them ? 



In the Parish of St. Elizabeth, there are six aban- 

 doned sugar estates, averaging each, over three thousand 

 acres. Neither of those estates, when under culture, pre- 

 tended to have more than one set of sugar works, and yet 

 each one of them, if divided up into twenty-five acre farms, 

 would have endowed one hundred and twenty resident 

 proprietors with a very independent freehold, for a laboring 

 man, within reach of a central mill of ample capacity for 

 the prompt manufacture of all he could produce. The six 

 estates could support seven hundred and twenty earnest, 

 industrious and independent laboring farmers, instead of 

 being abandoned as they have been, for not supporting 

 six unproductive non-resident landlords, and a retinue of 

 equally unproductive book-keepers, agents and attorryes. 



The same land distributed into five-acre farms would 

 support thirty-six hundred families, who could all carry 

 their canes to one mill and have them ground in due sea- 

 1 



