t years of freedom; and, so far is it from being equal to what it
was while slavery prevailed, and especially while the slave trade was
continued, that it now falls short of the production of that period by
an immense amount. In no way, therefore, can it be claimed, that the
cultivation of the British West India islands is on the increase, except
by resorting to the pious fraud of crediting the products of the
immigrant labor to the account of emancipation--a resort to which no
conscientious Christian man will have recourse, even to sustain a
philanthropic theory.

But the Island of Barbadoes is an exception. It is said to have suffered
no diminution in its production since emancipation, and that this result
was attained without the aid of immigrant labor. The _London Economist_
must be permitted to explain this phenomenon; and must also be allowed
to give its views on the subject of the effects of emancipation, after
the lapse of a quarter of a century from the date of the passage of the
Emancipation Act:

"We are no believers in Mr. Carlyle's gospel of the 'beneficent whip' as
the bearer of salvation to tropical indolence. But we can not for a
moment doubt that the first result of emancipation was, in most of the
islands, to substitute for the worst kind of moral and political evil,
one of a less fatal but still of a very pernicious kind. The negroes had
been treated as mere machines for raising sugar and coffee. They were
suddenly liberated from that mechanical drudgery; they became free
beings--but without the discipline needful to use freedom well, and
unfortunately with a larger amount of practical freedom than the
laboring class of any Northern or temperate climate could by any
possibility enjoy. They suddenly found themselves, in most of the
islands, in a position in many respects analagous to that of a people
possessed of a moderate property in England, who can supply their
principal wants without any positive labor, and have no ambition to rise
into any higher sphere than that into which they were born. The only
difference was, that the negroes in most of the West India islands
wanted vastly less than such people as these in civilized
States,--wanted nothing in fact, but the plantains they could grow
almost without labor, and the huts which they could build on any waste
mountain land without paying rent for it. The consequence naturally was,
that when the spur of physical tyranny was removed, there was no
su