ed. It had been predicted that emancipation would be a
death-blow to the British colonies. I suspect that many people are even
yet persuaded of it; now, in spite of the faults committed by the
planters, who have neglected nothing to disgust the negroes with labor
and to drive them from their old mills, they are found to return to
them, contenting themselves with wages that scarcely rise above an
average of a shilling a day. If we compare the two last censuses of
liberty with the two last years of slavery, we shall discover that the
total production of sugar has increased in the colonies in which
emancipation was effected in 1834. And they have not only had to endure
this crisis of emancipation, but also another crisis still more
formidable, that of the sudden introduction of free trade in 1834. The
colonial sugars, exposed to competition with the sugar produced at
Havana and elsewhere by slave labor, experienced a prodigious decline.
There was cause to believe that the production was about to be
destroyed; it has risen again, notwithstanding, and the English
Antilles, with their free negroes and their unprotected sugar, forced to
face entire liberty in all its forms, import to-day into the metropolis
nearly a million more hogsheads than at the moment when the crisis of
free trade broke forth.

Liberty works miracles. We always distrust her, and she replies to our
suspicions by benefits. The English Antilles, which, during the last
thirty years, have had to surmount, besides the two crises of
emancipation and free trade, the earthquake of 1840 and six consecutive
years of drought; the English Antilles, which have had to liquidate
their old debts, and to repair the ruin accruing from the failure of the
bank of Jamaica, are now in an attitude which proves that they have no
fears for the future and scarcely regret the past.

Under slavery, the Antilles were hastening to their ruin; with liberty,
they have become one of the richest channels of exportation which
England possesses; under slavery, they could not have supported the
shock of free trade; with liberty, they have gained this new battle:
such are the net proceeds of experience. If we still have doubts, let us
compare Dutch Guiana, which holds slaves, to English Guiana, which has
emancipated them. The resources of these two countries are almost equal;
English Guiana is progressing, while the cultures of Surinam are
forsaken; three-fourths of its plantations are alrea