iments. On
the other hand, much that is now produced makes no figure in the markets
of the world, because it is consumed by the people themselves, no longer
kept, for the profit of masters, at the lowest point at which they could
maintain an animal existence. And not only do they consume so much, but
they have enough left to buy from abroad whatever their increased
necessities cannot find at home. It was not so in the good old times.
Then the money that was made was sent to England to be spent by noble
and gentle landlords there, and little good did Jamaica get of it. So
little indeed was the island thought of even by the residents as a place
to spend money on, so much as a place to get money in that was to be
spent in England, that, as Mr. Sewell remarks, good roads have begun to
be built, to any considerable extent, only since freedom. Forlorn as
Kingston is, it was always forlorn; and not till slavery was abolished
did they think to introduce the water which is now supplied in such
abundance to the city. A rude profusion of luxury was all the planters
aimed at till they could get home to the refinements of the mother
country. In a word, in time of slavery, Jamaica was simply an
aggregation of sugar and coffee mills, kept running by a stream of human
blood. Now it is a land whose inhabitants are free to live for
themselves and for God, to enjoy the gifts of His hand, and to send into
the markets of the world, not a surplus which has cost one hundred
hecatombs of men each year, but a surplus which has cost no life, but
whose rich fruits come back to cheer and adorn thousands of lives.
Commerce may have lost by the change, and there may be some jewels the
less in the coronets of English nobility, but we may be permitted to
believe that Christ and humanity have no reason to grieve.

It must not be thought, however, that estates are going down as rapidly
now as formerly. Indeed, for a few years, I question whether more have
not been resumed than abandoned. In 1855 the value of exports of the
four staples, coffee, pimento, rum, and sugar, was L786,429; in 1856,
L814,659; in 1857, L1,141,472. I have not the statistics of the years
following. This check to the ruin of the estates is a matter of
rejoicing, for the entire abandonment of the island by the whites would
be a great disaster. As Mr. Underhill well observes, the ascendency of
the white man is needed to temper the enmity between the browns and the
blacks. The former,