its strongest. Still, if whatever of education and refinement there is
in Kingston would cordially combine it might make a pleasant society.
But it is divided into little cliques, each mortally afraid of the rest,
and producing, in their division, a paradise of tediousness.

Kingston, however, resembles New York in one important particular--it is
one of the worst-governed cities in Christendom. The Jews and the
mulattoes divide municipal honors between them, and rival, not
unworthily on a small scale, the united talents of Mozart and Tammany
for misgovernment and jobbery.

The stores of Kingston are well supplied with excellent English goods at
reasonable prices, and are served by numbers of fresh and fine-looking
British clerks. But of these much the greater number, I fear, fall under
the temptations of the prevailing immorality, and habits of drinking,
not to be indulged with impunity in such a climate, hurry multitudes of
them to speedy graves. What little sobriety and desire of improvement
exists among the young men is chiefly confined, I am told, to the
browns.

With the decline of exportations, the once flourishing trade of Kingston
has, of course, decreased. But it marks the eagerness of some to turn
everything to the discredit of emancipation, that this decline is
commonly attributed entirely to that event, no notice being taken of the
fact that Kingston was once the entrepot of a flourishing trade between
Europe and the Spanish Main, which, having, in 1816, shipping to the
amount of 199,894 tons, and having risen in 1828 to 254,290 tons, had in
1830, four years before the abolition of slavery, sunk to 130,747 tons.
The growing use of steam, making direct shipment to Europe more
convenient than transhipment, and changes in commercial relations, may
account for this falling off; but dates show that emancipation has
nothing to do with it. Of course the main cause of decline in the trade
of the city has been the decline in the prosperity of the island, but
such a change in the channels of trade as is indicated above was an
independent cause.

The statistics of illegitimacy, of infant mortality, of ignorance and
irreligion, and of destitution in Kingston, are shocking. Churches are
numerous, and congregations flourishing, but the vast mass of the
negroes are scarcely affected by them. This is very different from the
state of things in the country, and nothing could be more preposterous
than to judge of the rural