l_ competitors; and on the
back of these came the _unnatural_ bounty-fed beetroot sugar
competition. Meanwhile the expense of living increased in the days of
inflated hope and 'unexampled prosperity.' Free trade, whatever its
immediate consequences, was to make everyone rich in the end. When the
income of an estate fell short one year, it was to rise in the next, and
the money was borrowed to make ends meet; when it didn't rise, more
money was borrowed; and there is now hardly a property in the island
which is not loaded to the sinking point. Tied to sugar-growing,
Barbadoes has no second industry to fall back upon. The blacks, who are
heedless and light-hearted, increase and multiply. They will not
emigrate, they are so much attached to their homes; and the not distant
prospect is of a general bankruptcy, which may throw the land for the
moment out of cultivation, with a hungry unemployed multitude to feed
without means of feeding them, and to control without the personal
acquaintance and influence which alone can make control possible.

At home there is a general knowledge that things are not going on well
out there. But, true to our own ways of thinking, we regard it as their
affair and not as ours. If cheap sugar ruins the planters, it benefits
the English workman. The planters had their innings; it is now the
consumer's turn. What are the West Indies to us? On the map they appear
to belong more to the United States than to us. Let the United States
take them and welcome. So thinks, perhaps, the average Englishman; and,
analogous to him, the West Indian proprietor reflects that, if admitted
into the Union, he would have the benefit of the American market, which
would set him on his feet again; and that the Americans, probably
finding that they, if not we, could make some profit out of the islands,
would be likely to settle the black question for him in a more
satisfactory manner.

That such a feeling as this should exist is natural and pardonable; and
it would have gone deeper than it has gone if it were not that there are
two parties to every bargain, and those in favour of such a union have
met hitherto with no encouragement. The Americans are wise in their
generation. They looked at Cuba; they looked at St. Domingo. They might
have had both on easy terms, but they tell you that their constitution
does not allow them to hold dependent states. What they annex they
absorb, and they did not wish to absorb another mi