training and superintendence. The consequences of this state of
matters are very disastrous. Not a few missionaries and teachers,
often struggling with difficulties which they could not overcome,
have returned to Europe, and others are preparing to follow them.
Chapels and schools are abandoned, or they have passed into the
charge of very incompetent instructors."--_Quoted in King's Jamaica_,
p. 111.

Population gradually diminishes, furnishing another evidence that the
tendency of every thing is adverse to the progress of civilization. In
1841, the island contained a little short of 400,000 persons. In 1844,
the census returns gave about 380,000; and a recent journal states
that of those no less than forty thousand have in the last two years
been carried off by cholera, and that small-pox, which has succeeded
that disease, is now sweeping away thousands whom that disease had
spared. Increase of crime, it adds, keeps pace with the spread of
misery throughout the island.

The following extracts from a Report of a Commission appointed in 1850
to inquire into the state and prosperity of Guiana, are furnished by
Lord Stanley in his second letter to Mr. Gladstone, [London, 1851.]

Of Guiana generally they say--

"'It would be but a melancholy task to dwell upon the misery and ruin
which so alarming a change must have occasioned to the proprietary
body; but your Commissioners feel themselves called upon to notice
the effects which this wholesale abandonment of property has produced
upon the colony at large. Where whole districts are fast relapsing
into bush, and occasional patches of provisions around the huts of