as against only 15,824 whites? That St. Kitts held, even as late as
1761, 7000 whites; but in 1826--before emancipation--only 1600? Or
that little Montserrat, which held, about 1648, 1000 white families,
and had a militia of 360 effective men, held in 1787 only 1300
whites, in 1828 only 315, and in 1851 only 150?

It will be said that this ugly decrease in the white population is
owing to the unfitness of the climate. I believe it to have been
produced rather by the introduction of sugar cultivation, at which
the white man cannot work. These early settlers had grants of ten
acres apiece; at least in Barbadoes. They grew not only provisions
enough for themselves, but tobacco, cotton, and indigo--products now
all but obliterated out of the British islands. They made cotton
hammocks, and sold them abroad as well as in the island. They
might, had they been wisely educated to perceive and use the natural
wealth around them, have made money out of many other wild products.
But the profits of sugar-growing were so enormous, in spite of their
uncertainty, that, during the greater part of the eighteenth
century, their little freeholds were bought up, and converted into
cane-pieces by their wealthier neighbours, who could afford to buy
slaves and sugar-mills. They sought their fortunes in other lands:
and so was exterminated a race of yeomen, who might have been at
this day a source of strength and honour, not only to the colonies,
but to England herself.

It may be that the extermination was not altogether undeserved; that
they were not sufficiently educated or skilful to carry out that
'petite culture' which requires--as I have said already--not only
intellect and practical education, but a hereditary and traditional
experience, such as is possessed by the Belgians, the Piedmontese,
and, above all, by the charming peasantry of Provence and Languedoc,
the fathers (as far as Western Europe is concerned) of all our
agriculture. It may be, too, that as the sugar cultivation
increased, they were tempted more and more, in the old hard drinking
days, by the special poison of the West Indies--new rum, to the
destruction both of soul and body. Be that as it may, their
extirpation helped to make inevitable the vicious system of large
estates cultivated by slaves; a system which is judged by its own
results; for it was ruinate before emancipation; and emancipation
only gave the coup de gra