convinced that a lesson on the beauty of freedom was to be conveyed to
foreign sugar-growers and slave-owners by the means of a tax upon the
products of their plantations. Therefore, after a long and somewhat
eager struggle, the principle of free trade was allowed to prevail in
regard to sugar. The duties on sugar were made equal. The growth of the
sugar plantations was admitted on the same terms into that country,
without any reference either to the soil from which it had sprung or to
the conditions under which it was grown.

It had for a long time been stoutly proclaimed that the abolition of
slavery must be the destruction of our West Indian colonies. Years had
elapsed and the West Indian colonies still survived. Now the cry of
alarm was taken up again, and it was prophesied that although they had
got over the abolition of slavery they never could survive the
equalization of the sugar duties. Jamaica certainly had fallen greatly
away from her period of temporary and factitious prosperity. Jamaica was
owned and managed by a class of proprietors who resembled in many ways
some of the planters of the States of America farthest south--of the
States toward the mouth of the Mississippi. They lived in a kind of
careless luxury, mortgaging their estates as deeply as they possibly
could, throwing over to the coming year the superabundant debts of the
last, and only managing to keep their heads above water so long as the
people of England, by favoring them with a highly protective system,
enabled them still to compete against those who grew sugar on better and
more economical plans. The whole island was given over to neglect and
mismanagement. The emancipated negroes took but little trouble to
cultivate the plots of ground they had obtained, and were quite content
if they could scratch enough from the soil to enable them barely to
live. Therefore Jamaica did at a certain time fall far below the level
of her former seeming prosperity.