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

DUTY PAID

n 'be saved

We are not at all certain that the fact relied upon by
porary, 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-

our conterr

T. =V n

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

r,
was a result, not a cause—the result a 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

ur years' cultiv

Lion of three -sugar

s 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,o7l
cwt

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 an-
nual nett revenue £17,559. And now comes the

ue of the picture. Apprenticeship bad 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 '£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, hi ;h prices

,Aia, no c in an artificially restricted labour
market, induce high wages; but, 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 ar-

" THE IRISH FELON.
sonable paper (the suc
made its appearance o

rest extent

ever, come uo

—The first number of this trea-
ssor of The United Irishman)

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