emed to the eyes of many a man who was not
inclined to support the protective principle in itself. When it was put
to him, whether he was willing to push the free-trade principle so far
as to allow countries growing sugar by slave labor to drive our
free-grown sugar out of the market, he was often inclined to give way
before this mode of putting the question, and to imagine that there
really was a collision between free trade and free labor. Therefore a
certain sentimental plea came in to aid the Protectionists in regard to
the sugar duties.

Many of the old Antislavery party found themselves deceived by this
fallacy, and inclined to join the agitation against the reduction of the
duty on foreign sugar. On the other hand, it was made tolerably clear
that the labor was not so scarce or so dear in the colonies as had been
represented, and that colonial sugar grown by free labor really suffered
from no inconvenience except the fact that it was still manufactured on
the most crude, old-fashioned, and uneconomical methods. Besides, the
time had gone by when the majority of the English people could be
convinced that a lesson on the beauty of freedom was to be conveyed to
foreign sugar-growers and slave-owners by the means of a tax upon the
products of their plantations. Therefore, after a long and somewhat
eager struggle, the principle of free trade was allowed to prevail in
regard to sugar. The duties on sugar were made equal. The growth of the
sugar plantations was admitted on the same terms into that country,
without any reference either to the soil from which it had sprung or to
the conditions under which it was grown.

It had for a long time been stoutly proclaimed that the abolition of
slavery must be the destruction of our West Indian colonies. Years had
elapsed and the West Indian colonies still survived. Now the cry of
alarm was taken up again, and it was prophesied that although they had
got over the abolition of slavery they never could survive the
equalization of the sugar duties. Jamaica certainly had fallen greatly
away from her period of temporary and factitious prosperity. Jamaica was
owned and managed by a class of proprietors who resembled in many ways
some of the planters of the States of America farthest south--of the
States toward the mouth of the Mississippi. They lived in a kind of
careless luxury, mortgaging their estates as deeply as they possibly
could, throwing over to the coming year the superabun