got into full activity, they did not need to care how many slaves they killed by overwork; hence by force of the whip the estates were for a while highly productive. When George III. came to the throne, was perhaps the very acme of flourishing sugar estates. But the culture was very wasteful. Even the richest tropical lands will not bear crops forever with very partial manuring. The only manure was carried in a sort of bowl on a slave's head. The plough was not used; roads were hardly thought of; the hands of unwilling men and women were the only motive force. Meanwhile, the wealthiest of the planters became absentees, and lived extravagantly in England; many became members of Parliament; some rose to the peerage. The planters were manufacturers as well as agriculturists. There was no economy on the estates when the master's eye was removed, no reserving of capital for better manufacture or less prosperous times. The overseer, or manager, often kept more than one black or brown mistress, and freely used the resources of the estate for his own pleasures; nor were the managers always honest in other ways. The mercantile agents also made their harvest out of the estate; and if a loan on mortgage were required, things soon went from bad to worse. When the slave trade was forbidden, the fatal blow was struck. Yet already in 1792 the Jamaica House of Assembly reported that in the course of twenty-two years one hundred and seventy-seven estates had been sold for the payment of debts, and more than eighty thousand executions had taken place, for a total of more than twenty-two millions sterling. Bankruptcies abounded up to 1807, through manifest recklessness. The same ruin (Mr. Charles Buxton observes) came on the Dutch colony of Surinam, where, out of nine hundred and seventeen plantations, six hundred and thirty-six were abandoned, though no philanthropists there teased the planters. In our West Indies the planters had a monopoly of the British market: even sugar from British India was highly taxed, as a bonus to West Indian sugar. This did not suffice. They obtained bounties on their sugar, as well as protecting duties. The latter were computed to mulct the people of England of at least one million and a half sterling a year, which in eighteen years (from 1815 to 1833) alone amounted to twenty-seven millions; and in 1833 the West Indian estates were worth very little. Already in 1830 Lord Chandos presented a petition from the West Indies, setting forth "their extreme distress;" they earnestly solicited relief from Parliament; the distress was unparallelled; affluent families were reduced to penury; the West India Reporter said that without speedy relief numbers of planters must be ruined. They had killed off the negroes, had exhausted the soil, had lived extravagantly, and saved no capital, therefore could not pay wages; numbers were deeply mortgaged; they were liable to insurrections through the enmity which their wickedness had brought about; and after they had received much more than thirty millions in gratuities, bounties, and protecting duties, Whig ministers insisted that they deserved "compensation," and settled it by the claims of the planters in London, whose good-will (they fancied) would make things work smoothly in the colonies. Never was there so monstrous a price given for a property so rotten and already so laden with unjust gifts. But the Grey ministry was overwhelmingly strong; and the antislavery party, dreading to lose the crisis, submitted; while they grudged the apprenticeship more than the twenty millions. The public were so delighted to secure the main point, that they forgot all beside.
Mr. Charles Buxton thinks it clear, from the debates in 1831 and 1832, that the real cause which brought round the Parliament collectively to the conviction that slavery could not continue and must be legislatively extinguished somehow, was the undeniable decay of the slave population. Without new importations of slaves all the islands must become worthless. This, and no considerations of humanity, nor regard to the public voice, was the overwhelming argument. That the terrible decrease in the number of the negroes was caused by overwork and cruelties, was rendered certain by the fact that the women were more numerous than the men; also afterwards, by the steady increase of the black population when freedom was gained.
The Whig ministry took one step farther. They undertook, it is said, to give a promise, as a bonus to free sugar, that slave sugar (as of Brazil) should be excluded from our markets. How the promise of a ministry can bind Parliament, is not clear; but both the anti-slavery party (in its narrowest sense) and the planters much reproached Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston for breaking through this arrangement in 1846. These ministers ascertained that no free sugar was sold on the Continent; for the cheaper sugar from Brazil drove it out. No discouragement whatever to slave sugar
