The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1840-09-25 00:00:00

,hour immigration. The permission to remove fro

the' neighbourhood of Sierra Leone to the West Indies
will prove a boon of inestimable to the African ne-
groes, whose condition will be greatly improved by the

change

It is with infinite satisfaction that we refer to a
powerful leading article which appeared in the columns
of the Times of Wednesday last, and which we have
transferred to our own columns, on the present state
and future prospects of our West India Colonies.
The Times remarks with great force that the present
state of the West India Colonies " is a subject which
engages the attention of every British statesman and
philanthropist." The truth of this remark it would be
folly to attempt to deny ; and yet how little notice,
comparatively speaking, has been bestowed upon this
important subject by the public press of the country.
If all the factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire were
unemployed, and tumbling into ruin, we should find
the whole of the press busily employed in tracing out
the causes of such a ruinous depression of trade, and
in suggesting such remedies as might meet the
emergency of the case. But the West Indies, which
are of far greater value to this country than the fac-
tories in Yorkshire and Lancashire, are fast hastening
to poverty and ruin, and that in consequence of mea-
sures adopted by this country; and yet we hardly find
a word upon the subject in the columns of nine-tenths
of the newspapers of Great Britain and Ireland. One
might have imagined that the present high prices of
the principal articles of colonial produce would have
elicited a few occasional remarks on a topic of such
general interest. But we find that even self-interest is
not powerful enough to cause this topic to be agitated.
We hope, however, that the powerful advocacy of the
Times will induce the conservative journals in general
to take up the question without delay. It is seldom
that the Times takes up any subject in earnest without
giving the tone to the expression of public opinion.
We trust that the notice which that influential journal
has bestowed on West India affairs will not prove an
exception to the general rule.
The first point to which the Times adverts is, the
diminished production and high prices of West India
sugar. The statistical details which it furnishes on
this subject have already appeared more than once in
the columns of the STANDARD. They remain un-
contradicted up to the present hour, and give the lie
direct to the glowing exparte statements of the Anti-
Slavery agitators. It is of no avail to quote, in oppo-
sition to these official returns, the high prices recently
given in British Guiana for several large estates.
Those high prices have been notoriously given in
anticipation of increased facilities for the immigration
of free labourers into the colony. Remove the present
restrictions on the importation of the Hill Coolies and
of African labourers, and the prices of properties in
the West Indies will soon be doubled.
If we contrast the produce of the West Indies with
that of Mauritius, in the article of sugar, we shall find
that the latter Colony has already experienced the
benefits arising from an adequate supply of labour. If
the West Indies had beei placed upon the same foot-
ing this country would riot now have been under the
necessity of paying such a high price for sugar.
The remarks of the Times on the present actual con-
dition and future prospects of the West India Colo-
nies are characterised by sound sense and great
moderation ; while its censure of the government for
its quiescence and inactivity in reference to the subject
will, we feel assured, be echoed by every unprejudiced
person in the United Kingdom.
We particularly wish to direct the attention of our
readers to the very pertinent observations of the Times
on theinfluence which the present state of the West
India Colonies must have in confirming slavery, and
increasing the slave trade in other countries. We can
never properly estimate the importance of the West In-
dia question without viewing it in connection with
the existence of slave labour in foreign countries. We
must either encourage slavery and the slave trade, or we
must encourage free labour in our own colonies. We
' should ever remember that " Every .hand abstracted
from sugar cultivation in our own colonies without a