rettro to t4t Eititor.
THE WEST INDIA QUESTION.
U.
There exists in some quarters, so strong a desire to turn and twist, to misinterpret and pervert anything said in defence of our white fellow- subjects in the West Indies t4t, as a necessary measure of precaution, I beg emphatically to record my objection:to a return to slavery as well as to a return to protection. I fight the battle of freedom and of free-trade, against the partizans of servitude and monopoly. I do not, with Mr. Carlyle, make the creole population of our colonies responsible for the desolation and the ruin which followed in the wake of the important measures to which I al- luded in my last letter. But I signalize that ruin as an uncontrovertible and lamentable fact. Thousands in this country and in the colonies whose capital was invested in West India property, have seen that capital wither and waste and shrink away. Not only have they seen it, they have felt it too. Incomes which twenty years since were counted by thou- sands, have contracted to hundreds, incomes of hundreds have passed away, leaving nothing behind but opprobrious want and dire penury. Many hun- dreds of large estates in each of the chief islands have gone out of culti- vation. They were sold and resold, and at each sale the purchase-money be- came smaller, until ordinarily, at the last Bale, no value whatever was reckoned for the land, and the property, like a worn out ship, was bought for the worth of the old iron and copper which an estate-broker might collect in the sugar-houses. Smooth and rapid is the descent to the infer- nal regions of poverty, and first and foremost among those who rail
at a bankrupt are the men who elbowed him into Portugal Street. There has been no lack of charitable comments on the ruin of the West India land- owners. We have been told that they were thriftless, lazy, and silly. As- sertions thus curtly made and vehemently inculcated might possibly com- mand belief, but for the fact that the very estates which finally had to be abandoned passed through a great many hands while none of these hands could atop their downward progress. Strange ! that men of all classes, men generally esteemed for frugality, prudence, and energy, should lose those precious qualities the moment they became proprietors of a West India estate !—that the thrifty merchant should simply by meddling with that doomed soil, become wasteful, the lawyer silly, and the Scotch speculator a helpless, drivelling idiot ! Here are men who turned every- thing they touched into gold, and whose gold turns to lead the moment it touches the charmed soil of a plantation ! Again, if the fault lay with the proprietors ; if the men wrought their own ruin independent of circumstances, why were hundreds of square miles of fertile estates aban- doned? We too have thriftless landowners, and we too have estates brought to the hammer. But the estates find purchasers, and the clever speculator makes money out of the soil which swallowed the substance of his prede- cessor. Is there in the whole of this island an abandoned estate ? Is there a tract of land which fifteen years since bore rich harvests and which at this present day is overgrown with weeds and heather ? thousands of acres of land which no one will have, which no one will cultivate ? We cannot realize the idea of an abandoned estate, for with us large tracts of land which were never cultivated before are as year follows year, subjected to the plough and our worst moors are of greater value than the best West Indian estate though but recently gone out of cultivation. Here is a problem to ponder on for those who are fond of declaring that our colonists have wrought their own ruin.
The loving and charitable, who for years past acted as the correctors of the white population in the West Indies have an easy mode of solving this problem. Hundreds of estates have been abandoned because the labourers abandoned them, and they were so abandoned by the labourers, because the planter, true to his old habits as a slave owner, was a stern task-master to the Creole; because he paid very low wages and because those wages were paid in a very irregular manner. Sometimes, they were not paid at all. Thus the cruelty and greed of the planters wrought its own punishment ; it drove the labourers from his estates, and the labourers gone the land had to be abandoned.
Now I admit that among a number of farmers and landowners in a period
of twenty or more years and in a number of islands there may have been half-a-dozen cases of bad masters, bad more especially as paymasters. There are such in England, and I should say in every country in the world. The financial difficulties caused by the equalization of the duties on free and slave-grown sugar may also have tended, for a time at least, to deteriorate the paying virtues of the best of masters. Men, struggling in the grasp of an unforeseen calamity are apt to claim the indulgence of their friends and even of their dependants. We hear now and then of great English houses in which the servants' wages are irregularly paid. There are also bankruptcy cases in which claimants for services done and rendered get about 2d. in the pound. But do these exceptional insolvencies induce our servants to leave work altogether ? The man who cannot pay goes to the wall, but his successor in the same farm who can and does pay gets just as many labourers as he wants. There must be something peculiar in the air of the West Indies, for we are told with the greatest assurance that the occasional insolvency of a landowner has tended effectually to disgust the Creole population and to make them averse to field labour.
It is not irregularity alone—not even the nonpayment alone—but when
wages "are paid they are invariably low." In Jamaica, where for reasons to be stated hereafter the rate of wages is lowest, an able-bodied man can only earn a shilling a day. This is a broad assertion, and as untrue as it is broad. From a collection of letters written in answer to certain ques- tions by certain persons chiefly Methodist and Anabaptist ministers, and published by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, it appears that the wages of field-labourers are from Is. to Is. 6d. a day' that mechanics on estates earn 2s., and old people and children from 6d. to 9d. One writer mentions that in certain seasons the people in his district can earn from 3a. to 6s. a day, and the whole of the letters from Jamaica furnish incontro- vertible evidence that the average rate of pay for task-work on estates is from Is. 6d. to 2s. a day. I make this assertion broadly, distinctly, and peremptorily. I will not weary you with extracts from the said collection, but should any person connected with the British and Foreign Anti- Slavery Society dare to dispute my statements, I am ready to confute him with his own pamphlet and to silence him by the mouths of his own witnesses.
I should also add that, for reasons to be specified hereafter, the rate of pay for task-work is lower in Jamaica than in the other chief settlements. But irrespective of one, two, or three shillings let me ask every practice i man whether any real importance is to be attached to the nominal quota-
tion of a wage. A man may be able to earn five shillings a day, but if the fire shillings are to be earned in a place where his living costs him 28. 6d., it is quite clear that his daily profit of 6d. cannot enable him to provide for his old age or to marry and bring up a family of children. Again, a man may earn 2s. a day in a place where his keep costs him 6d., and where con- sequently his daily profits amount to 18. 6d. The 69. a day in the one case is a vsry low wage, and the 28. in the other is a very high one, for it is not the receipt but the balance between receipt and expenditure which deter- mines the real nature of wages. Or to bring the ease home to more elevated understandings, suppose that the secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society had the offer of a foreign .appoin8ment worth 1000/. a year. The prospect of so large a salary is cheering even to the most disinterested, but blank disap- pointment would take the place of agreeable surprise if, on inquiry, the gentleman in question were informed of the excessive expensiveness of his destined place of residence; if he were told that the commonest necessaries of life would in the course of the year cost him 9751. out of his 1000/. He would probably prefer a more modest salary in a cheaper place, fully con- tent to have an annual surplus of more than 261. for investment in securities or hobbies.
Even granting, for argument's sake, the truth of the preposterous state- ment, that an ablebodied labourer in Jamaica can at most earn from 9d. to is. a day, I maintain that, irrespective of the apparent money value of the wage, the labourer's pay in Jamaica is ample and liberal, and I maintain this proposition by adducing the evidence of the various publi- cations of the Anti-Slavery Society, in which it is distinctly stated that within the last twenty years the agricultural labourers of the island have bought up land at the rate of 5000 acres a year ; that on this land they re- side' and that on it they have erected substantial, commodious dwellings, not labourers' dens where a whole family herds together in one room as in civilized, phikethropie. old-christian England, but large and com- modious dwellings, furnished withbeds, chairs, &c., &c., such as are not to be found in any field labourer's cottage from the v to the Land's end. To clinch this argument, I may as well transcribe the boasts(Tone of the Correspondents of the Anti-Slavery Society, who tells us, "that the Creoles rival the Europeans in dress ; that they possess a number of horses, asses, and mules; that on public occasions of charity they can afford to be very liberal and that at times they are able to land their late owners money.' All these statements, the correctness of which is undisputed, are made to show that the liberated Africans arc thrifty and industrious, and great stress is laid upon the fact, that while after emancipation the people commenced their new life without a sixpence, at present thousands of them are land- owners, householders, horse-owners, cart-owners, ass-owners, and capitalists. Their rapid progress from penury to affluence proves their industry, but it also proves that that industry was amply rewarded. Their shilling a day, even if irregularly paid or not paid at all, must have gone a long way with the Jamaica Creoles. True our agricultural labourers are a hardy, hardwork- ing, persevering, and industrious race, and I believe their average earnings exceed a shilling a day ; but they live and toil, and die without one in a thousand ever owning an acre of land or even a cottage, however small and miserable it be. *A population of labouring men, one-half of whom ad- vance within twenty years to the position of well-to-do peasant proprietors, cannot, in the common nature of things, be underpaid, much less can they be cheated out of their wages. Nor are we to believe that the Jamaica Creoles obtained their lands and moveables by fraud and violence ? Twenty years since they had nothing whatever; at present they own a large amount of property. They must either have purchased that property out of their savings, or they must have got it by foul means. I leave the Anti-Slavery
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