ice of sugar fell, and the estates yielded little more than the
expense of cultivation. Owners of properties who were their own
managers, and had sense and energy, continued to keep themselves afloat;
but absenteeism had become the fashion. The brilliant society which is
described by Labat had been melting for more than a century. More and
more the old West Indian families removed to England, farmed their lands
through agents and overseers, or sold them to speculating capitalists.
The personal influence of the white man over the black, which might have
been brought about by a friendly intercourse after slavery was
abolished, was never so much as attempted. The higher class of gentry
found the colony more and more distasteful to them, and they left the
arrangement of the labour question to persons to whom the blacks were
nothing, emancipated though they might be, except instruments of
production. A negro can be attached to his employer at least as easily
as a horse or a dog. The horse or dog requires kind treatment, or he
becomes indifferent or sullen; so it is with the negro. But the forced
equality of the races before the law made more difficult the growth of
any kindly feeling. To the overseer on a plantation the black labourer
was a machine out of which the problem was to get the maximum of work
with the minimum of pay. In the slavery times the horse and dog relation
was a real thing. The master and mistress joked and laughed with their
dark bondsmen, knew Caesar from Pompey, knew how many children each had,
gave them small presents, cared for them when they were sick, and
maintained them when they were old and past work. All this ended with
emancipation. Between whites and blacks no relations remained save that
of employer and employed. They lived apart. They had no longer, save in
exceptional instances, any personal communication with each other. The
law refusing to recognise a difference, the social line was drawn the
harder, which the law was unable to reach.

In the Antilles the plantations broke up as I had seen in Grenada. The
whites went away, and the land was divided among the negroes. In
Barbadoes, the estates were kept together. The English character and the
English habits were stamped deeper there, and were not so easily
obliterated. But the stars in their courses have fought against the old
system. Once the West Indies had a monopoly of the sugar trade. Steam
and progress have given them a hundred _natura