says with
reason, impoverish the soil by their roots. The shade causes excess
of moisture, chills, weakens and retards the plants; encourages
parasitic moss and insects; and, moreover, is least useful in the
very months in which the sun is hottest, viz. February, March, and
April, which are just the months in which the Bois Immortelles shed
their leaves. He believes that the cacao needs no shade after the
third year; and that, till then, shade would be amply given by
plantains and maize set between the trees, which would, in the very
first year, repay the planter some 6500 dollars on his first outlay
of some 8000. It is not for me to give an opinion upon the
correctness of his estimates: but the past history of Trinidad
shows so many failures of the cacao crop, that even a practically
ignorant man may be excused for guessing that there is something
wrong in the old Spanish system; and that with cacao, as with wheat
and every other known crop, improved culture means improved produce
and steadier profits.

As an advocate of 'petite culture,' I heartily hope that such may be
the case. I have hinted in these volumes my belief that exclusive
sugar cultivation, on the large scale, has been the bane of the West
Indies.

I went out thither with a somewhat foregone conclusion in that
direction. But it was at least founded on what I believed to be
facts. And it was, certainly, verified by the fresh facts which I
saw there. I returned with a belief stronger than ever, that
exclusive sugar cultivation had put a premium on unskilled slave-
labour, to the disadvantage of skilled white-labour; and to the
disadvantage, also, of any attempt to educate and raise the Negro,
whom it was not worth while to civilise, as long as he was needed
merely as an instrument exerting brute strength. It seems to me,
also, that to the exclusive cultivation of sugar is owing, more than
to any other cause, that frightful decrease throughout the islands
of the white population, of which most English people are, I
believe, quite unaware. Do they know, for instance, that Barbadoes
could in Cromwell's time send three thousand white volunteers, and
St. Kitts and Nevis a thousand, to help in the gallant conquest of
Jamaica? Do they know that in 1676 Barbadoes was reported to
maintain, as against 80,000 black, 70,000 free whites; while in 1851
the island contained more than 120,000 Negroes and people of colour,