The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-02-15 00:00:00

.ose as cultivation was extended

res are ta,

ie expo:

hey have been

especially entr

gradually sinking; but we more

e effect of emancipation, which, in
ten years, reduced the annual value of the three
principal staples from £2,791,478, to £1,213,284,
being the proportion of seven to sixteen, or equal,
at five per cent., to an investment of about thirty-
two millions of property annihilated. We believe
the history of the world would be in vain searched
for any parallel case of oppression, perpetrated by
ed government upon any section of its own
lie same, and in some islands even
esults have been observed through-

t attention to fiie evidence here

adduced of ti

a civilis

subjects

nore startli
)ut those colonies

It cannot escape observation, after a perusal of the
able above, how closely and immediately a (IP-'
n the productiveness of our West Indi.
las followed every interference of the home govern-

ent with the mode c

,a colonies

a fact besides, that each

furtiler concession on the part of the colonists has
been wrung from them before they had time to
accommodate their circumstances to the altered
position in which they had been placed by the con-
Blow has followed

cession immediatel

y preceding

rous innictions required to appease the brawling of
mock philanthropists at home, more than by any
necessity existing in the colonies themselves. The
planter deprived of his property in the slaves work-
ing on his estate, and unable any longer to com-
mand the required quantity of labour for the culti-
vation of his estate, except at enormously high
wages, entreated to be allowed to import free
labourers from Africa or any other country, the
constitutions of whose people were fitted for toil in
a tropical climate. Such reasonable demands, al-
though made with offers of a full guarantee that
such importation should be perfectly voluntary, and
the condition of the emigrants so drawn to the
West Indies should be one of perfect freedom,
'lave been met with hypocritical doubts and
cofounded fears which, up to the present session
.•
it, have been sufficiently harassing to
ltogether to the once flattering prospect
he planter of repairing his past losses,
g a successful issue to the noble efforts
en to raise the products of the tropics
le required extent without trendbing upon the

and of gi

freedom, or decreasing the happir
being, whatever his count/

coloiii

I any human

and whatever his

the es

Whilst such has been the decline
of our colonies, which is traceable step by
the successive meddlings of our government in th,
concerns of the planters and merchants of the
West Indies, a directly opposite result has been
realised by the planters of Cuba and the Bermu-
das. At the period of the abolition of the slave
trade these countries were very trifling producers,
and exported no sugar whatever; the slaveowners
now became very large producers, and within a
very short period Cuba alone has increased her ex-
ports from 50,000 tons to more than 200,000 tons.
In fact, every discouragement which we have thrown
in the way of our colonial fellow-subjects in their
efforts to procure a moderate supply of labour,
commencing with the act of 1807, for the abolition
of the slave trade as carried on by British subjects,
have been so many direct encouragements fur-

_I by our rulers not only to the cultivation of
by means of foreign slave labour, but to the
ise of t'

slave trade its

Nye snail extract from an able article in this
month's Blackwood a few statements showing that
the diminution of the value of West Indian pro-
perty has been equal to the diminution of West
Indian exports. We begin with Demerara :

Anna Catherina Estate
Providence

Thomas

In 1840, the d

1838. price.
£30,000 £50,000
38,000 80,000

20,000 40,000
,preciation became greater. Here are a

Rome & Houston Estate

£40,000 £lOO,OOO
30,000 55,000

Kitty 26,000 60,000
William
In 1844, the Groenveldt_estate, formerly valued at

£35,000, was sold for £lO,OOO. in 1845, the Baillie's
Hope estate, formerly valued at £50,000, was disposed of
for £7,000. And in 1846, the Haarlem estate went for

£3,500, whereas its previous value was not less than

is it not preposterous to suppose that there
can be anything like a fair competition between
the British and the foreign planter situated towards
each other as they now are—the one involved in
almost utter ruin and insolvency, caused by our
own treatment of his interests, and the other in-
flated with prosperity, created by those very acts
by which we have sacrificed our colonial fellow-
countrymen ? Is it consistent with free trade
doctrines that one country should be permitted to
buy its labour in the cheapest market, and the other
compelled to buy the same commodity in the
dearest ? Certainly not; yet this is the position
advanced by her Majesty's Whig Government and
a majority of the free trade party. These philoso-
phers offer to the West Indians, indeed, a few
trifling concessions which might have saved much
distress and loss if tendered at an earlier period.
But though the effects of the act of 1846 are before
them ; although many millions of property have
been swept away ,by that iniquitous measure, they
still cling to the full maintenance of principles for
the unregulating the colonial industry of the
country; which principles, where they even prove
to be correct as regards every other interest in the
country, have, evidently, in the case of the West
Indies, one exception at least,—they tell the planter
to lay aside his fears, to introduce into his cultiva-
tion fresh capital and improved machinery. Bitter
mockery; when the planters know that the ink is
scarcely dry upon the document upon which simi-
lar designing assurances were held out to them.
The act of 1846 possesses about it as little of the
character of the law of the Medes and Persians,
which altereth not, as the final settlement of 1842,
whose existence is already only a thing of history.

-ELECTION