er
since the beginning of the century.'

The distinguished historian of the island, Bryan Edwards, himself a
planter, and opposed to the abolition of the slave trade, describes the
sugar cultivation, even before the supply of labor from Africa was cut
off, as precarious in the highest degree, a mere lottery, and often, he
says, 'a millstone around the neck of the unfortunate proprietor.' That
this was from no invincible necessity, the uniform prosperity of
numerous estates shows. But these estates are all conducted
economically, while, on the other hand, reckless extravagance was the
rule in the palmy days of the olden time, and has remained, even in
humbler circumstances, an inborn trait of the Creole gentleman.

If this was so during the continuance of the slave trade, what could
have been looked for when this means of obtaining labor was suddenly cut
off? Sewell states the estimated supply of negroes from Africa necessary
to make up the annual waste at ten thousand. When this ceased it was
obvious that only such a complete revolution in the system of labor as
should save the horrible waste of life could preserve the plantations
from ruin and the island from depopulation. But though the waste of life
was diminished, it still went on. Estate after estate had to be given up
for want of hands, at the same time that a constant decrease in the
price of sugar in London, amounting to fifty per cent between 1815 and
1835, made it less and less profitable to work the remaining ones, and
thus the planters were going steadily to ruin and the negro population
steadily to extinction, for almost a generation before emancipation. In
a memorial of the planters to Parliament in 1831, three years before
abolition, they declare that without Parliamentary aid they are doomed
to hopeless ruin. Already, they say, hundreds of respectable persons had
been reduced almost to beggary by the precarious condition of the
planting interest. In this memorial they make no allusion to the
anti-slavery agitations, which produced no serious effect in the colony
till 1832. Indeed the West Indian interest had been a notorious
mendicant of old, and as in time a large part of West Indian estates had
come to be owned by the British aristocracy, this begging was not apt to
be in vain. Could Creole thriftlessness have been abolished and the
slave trade retained, the ruin of the estates might have been averted.
But as human power was not adequate to the first,