The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-06-27 00:00:00

£4,459,495, the article of sugar amounted in 1846-47
to £1,518,124 125., or one-third of the total ex-
ports, the amount of that article in 1834-35 having
been only £131,985 4s. Every year the sugar cul-
tivation has been increasing in importance to the
country, notwithstanding the suicidal legislation of
the British Parliament ; yet it is this very cultiva-
tion, which represents, and forms a means of remit-
tance for, a million and a half sterling value of
British manufactures, which we are now preparing
to destroy altogether. The sugar cultivation of
Bengal alone is estimated to employ from 400,000
to 600,000 of the population, and 300,000 acres of
land, in which if, as is anticipated, it is reduced
from its present quantity, 60,000 tons per annum,
to 20,000 tons, something like 300,000 people must
be deprived of employment, and 200,000 acres of
land thrown into its primitive state of jungle, whilst
a million sterling of exports must be lost to the
British manufacturer.

It must be borne in mind by the advocates of
free trade, that the sugar cultivation once destroyed,
India has nothing of importance to substitute for
it ; for it will be seen that, out of a total increase
of exports to Great Britain since 1834-35, of
£2,932,946, the three articles of sugar, indigo and
silk made up £2,575,678 18s.; and during the
vast year the production of one of these, indigo,
has been a ruinous trade to the Indian farmer. Of
course, we shall be told that, although we may
lose the sugar trade of India and, with it, the sale
of the manufactured goods taken in exchange for
that commodity, the latter will be made up to us
by the increased purchases from us of the foreign
planter. We sheaved, however, in our last that no
such result has followed our increased importations
of slave-grown sugar during the past year; and
the fact must be taken into consideration that, by
encouraging the industry of India we are aiding
the march of civilization, and spreading European
tastes and wants amongst a population of a hundred
millions of freemen, whilst, by encouraging slave
production, we are distributing our favors amongst
a class, who never have consumed, and never are
likely to increase their consumption of, manufac-
tured articles of other than the very rudest de-
scription.

IT is rather too much the practice of our Free-
trade authorities to argue from premises and results
denuded of the correlative circumstances by which
those results have been influenced. An instance
of this practice is contained in an article in the
Manchester Guardian of Wednesday last. We
quote it as follows :

" Every advance in the price of sugar led to an increased
competition for the services of labourers,—to a rise in the
rate of wages,—and to such an increased cost of produc-
tion—as rendered it of no value to the planter. SUGAR
CULTIVATION IN THE WEST INDIES IS SHOWN, BY CLEAR
EVIDENCE, TO HAVE BEEN A RUINOUS PURSUIT—IN
YEARS WHEN THE PRICE IN THE COUNTRY REACHED NO
LESS THAN 48S. IN BOND, OR 725. DUTY PAID. This was
in 1840. A high price is, therefore, most clearly not the
road through which the planter can be saved."

We are not at all certain that the fact relied upon by
our contemporary, that sugar cultivation was so very
ruinous a trade in 1840, is so well proved as he
alleges. We find that, in Antigua, Mr. Tollemache
made a profit on five estates of £12,843 in that year,
whereas, in 1846, he suffered a loss of £269. Of
course, in other colonies there might be varied
results. We pass, however, over the question as to
the correctness of the Guardian's facts to deal with
his principle. A high price of sugar, he says, leads
to a high rate of wages ; and with high prices in
1840 the cultivation was ruinous. But was there
nothing but the high price of sugar to give a sti-
mulus to the rate of wages ? Of course there was.
There was the direct interference of the British
Government in 1839, by which the apprenticeship
system was terminated ; and the negroes in our co-
lonies, released from every tie, unrestrained even by
laws similar to those which bind employer and
labourer together in this and other countries, were
enabled to gratify their own indolent inclinations,
to laugh at their former masters, and to steal off
and squat or vagabondise in the canebrakes or in
the bush. Doubtless under such circumstances,
with their crops rotting in the ground, the planters
bid tolerably high for labour; but that high bidding
was a result, not a cause—the result of ' circum-
stances, which the Guardian disingenuously keeps
in the back ground.
Let us see how the termination of the period of
apprenticeship—that breach of a direct compact
with the planters—affected wages. We have before
us a table, handed in to the committee on sugar
planting by Thomas Naughten, Esq., a Demerara
planter and West Indian merchant, giving the
results of four years' cultivation of three sugar
estates in British Guiana in four years of slavery,
four years of apprenticeship, and six years of free
labour. In the four years of slavery, viz., from
1825 to 1828, the estates in question yieldedBs,o7 I
cwts, nett of sugar, the annual average cost of pro-
duction being about 6s. per cwt., and the average
annual nett revenue £20,523. In the four years of
apprenticeship, terminating in 1838, they yielded
71,073 nett, the average annual cost of production
being about Bs. 9d. per cwt., and the average dn-
nual nett revenue £17,559. And now comes the
reverse of the picture. Apprenticeship had been
abolished, and the planter submitted to the caprice
of the labourer, by a Government which threw every
possible obstacle in the way of additional hands
finding their way to the colonies to replace those
who had permanently withdrawn themselves from
the cultivation. In the six years, from 1840 to
1846, although in two of these estates there was a
profit in 1840—the Guardian's ruinous year—of
£8,500, there was only at the end of 1846 a nett
gain of r£1,139 for the whole six years, in estates
which returned annually £20,500 in the first period
and £17,500 in the second. The nett produce for
the six years was only 56,593 cwt., or less by 30.000
cwts. than in four years of slavery, and less by
25,000 cwts. than in four years of apprenticeship,
whilst the average cost of production for the six
years had risen to 295. sd. per cwt., or 20s. Bd. in
the very year specified by the Guardian over the
previous four years of apprenticeship, and 235. sd.
over the cost in four years of slavery.
It is not fair to lay down such a dogma as that
of the Guardian, as applicable to the present posi-
tion of our sugar colonies. When we were totally
dependent upon them for our supply, high prices
would, no doubt, in an artificially restricted labour
market, induce high wages; hut, with the competi-
tion to which we are now submitted, and with real
and bona fide measures, for promoting the immigra-
tion of labourers, provided for our colonists, this
result can never happen to ary great extent.

"THE IRISH FELON."—The first number of this trea-
sonable paper (the successor of The United Irishman)
made its appearance on Saturday. It does not, how-
ever, come up to its model in point of vigour, or open and
advised writing of sedition. The leading article bears the
signature of John Martin, who is evidently displeased that
the insurrection did not break out on the day that Mitchel
was transported, as he conceives that the "abject submis-
sion of the Irish people, in that matter, might destroy the
national cause for this generation." Much nearer "to
the mark," and with far more vigour, comes out Mr.
Devin Reilly, who addresses a letter "to the Englishman,
calling himself Earl of Clarendon, her Majesty's chief
legal murderer, and jury-packer-general of Ireland." He
declares his intention to tell his Lordship all that goes on
whilst his hand remains without a handcuff or a weapon,
He commences each paragraph with the words " My Lord
Assassin," and signs himself " My Lord Assassin, your
enemy to the death." The following sentence is a fair
sample of the whole letter, which is very long :—" An
eminent diplomatist, like your Lordship, a mild and equa-
ble chief governor, who can walk from that den of conspi-
rators you call your Privy Council, with the blood of men
marked out for slaughter clotted round your soul, into a
philosophic re-union of bullock-feeders and men-starvers,
and there talk blandly and glibly of the ' state of the
country' you wilfully devastate—a man like you, who can
plot in your chamber with that recreant bravo you call
your ' Catholic Attorney-General,' and his sheriffs and
jurors, to take away honest men's liberties and lives, and
then ride out in gilded caparison, with the tailoring of a
soldier on you, and look Heaven in the face, and man—a
' Lord Lieutenant,' I say, with a convenient conscience of
that kind, might forget the truculent, base, and cowardly
manner in which you have done, into the slavery of the
hulks in a distant land, your mortal enemy and my im-
mortal friend. I will take care you shall not. Step by
step, and week by week, free or chained, with pen in hand,
by word of mouth, in prayer to God, I will repeat your
infamy, and make others repeat it, till the Irish winds that
whistle round you byday, and the serpent conscience which
coils you round by night, scowling on you, shall alike hiss
in your ears the one word—' Assassin !' " To wind up, it
is to be observed that the Felon sneers down the grand
" Irish League," laughs outright at simple Repeal, and
will be content with nothing short of a wholesale revolu-
tion, and the establishment of an Irish Republic. Inde-
pendent of this new firebrand, the treason market is
pretty well supplied. The Nation is highly peppered with
allusions to the pike as the veritable "queen of weapons;"
and the Tribune is scarcely a whit behind its more ancient
teacher of the science of warfare. The former organ is
filled with the weekly proceedings of the clubs. Lectures,
inculcating the imperative necessity of procuring arms, are
delivered almost nightly at these foci of sedition. Several
of the " presidents" are young men of respectable birth
and education.