r temptation to embark capital in sugar
plantations,--the West Indies enjoying a monopoly in this article,
while they had competitors in the Southern States of America in the
other. I have, therefore, no hesitation in saying, that, with a
trifling capital, under prudent management, indigo might be
cultivated to a very great extent, and with considerable profit,
even now, in Jamaica. But the adventurer is not to expect to count
his gains, as the original growers did, by thousands; he must be
content with hundreds, if not fifties; for at the present day every
branch of industry is laden with difficulties, encumbered by
taxation, and obstructed by competition. There are two objections,
however, which I have not removed,--I allude to "the failure of the
seasons and the ravages of the worm." Very little need be said to
combat these. Seasons are mutable, and the same heaven that frowns
this year on the labors of the husbandman, may smile the next; while
a remedy for the "ravages of the worm" may be found in the mutation
of the soil, the destruction of the grub, or the rotation of
crops,--accessories to success which seem not to have entered into
the vocabularies of the twenty pseudo indigo-growers, "many of them
men of knowledge, foresight and property."

The following passage from Bryan Edwards will corroborate much that
I have endeavored to enforce. It furnishes not only a solution which
has been hinted at before, of the enigma why indigo ceased to be
cultivated in Jamaica, but also _an incentive_ to re-introduce the
culture. He says (p. 444), "It is a remarkable and well-known
circumstance, after the cultivation of indigo was suppressed by an
exorbitant duty of near L20 the hundred-weight, Great Britain was
compelled to pay her rivals and enemies L200,000 annually for this
commodity, so essential to a great variety of her most important
manufactures. At length, the duty being repealed, and a bounty some
time after substituted in its place, the States of Georgia and South
Carolina entered upon, and succeeding in the culture of this
valuable plant, supplied at a far cheaper rate than the French and
Spaniards (receiving too our manufactures in payment) not only the
British consumption, but also enabled Great Britain to export a
surplus at an advanced price to foreign markets."--It is there