230 



humboldt's cuba. 



Cuba, have not been realized ; it being matter of 

 public notoriety that it is still carried on there on a 

 large scale, with the connivance of the government, 

 and in flagrant opposition to the known wishes of 

 the great majority of the Cubans. His sketch of 

 slavery, as it exists in that island, is worthy the 

 careful attention of men, of every opinion regarding 

 the institution itself. We have spoken elsewhere 1 

 of what we deem the fallacy of the decrease of the 

 slaves in Cuba by death ; but a conclusive argu- 

 ment on this point is presented in the fact that while, 

 by a liberal computation, there have been imported 

 into Cuba 644,108 Africans, there are now in that 

 island 662,599 slaves, and 219,170 free blacks, 

 making a total of 881,769 Africans and their de- 

 scendants, while in all the English Antilles an 

 importation of 2,130,000 negroes was represented 

 by 700,000 in 1825.— {See note to p. 192, chap. V.) 

 This result has only been paralleled in the Southern 

 States of our own confederacy, for even in the free 

 negro islands of the American Mediterranean, we 

 are led, by the best information we can obtain, to 

 suppose that the black population, as well as the 

 white, experiences a constant decrease. If it be 

 true that population can increase only under a con- 



1 See note at the close of Chapter V. 



