ENTERED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by JOHN F.
TROW, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States
for the Southern District of New York.

JOHN F. TROW, PRINTER.

* * * * *

THE CONTINENTAL MONTHLY:

DEVOTED TO

LITERATURE AND NATIONAL POLICY.

VOL. IV.--JULY, 1863.--No. I.

EMANCIPATION IN JAMAICA.

The luminous summary of statistical facts published in the March number
of the _Atlantic Monthly_ for 1862, has, in a few pages, conclusively
settled the question whether emancipation in the smaller islands of the
British West Indies has been a success or a failure. It applies the
standard of financial results, which, though the lowest, is undoubtedly
the best; for the defenders of slavery would hardly choose its moral
advantages as their strong position, and if its alleged economical
advantages turn out also an illusion, there is not much to be said for
it. Indeed, of late they have been growing shy of the smaller islands,
which furnish too many weapons for the other side, and too few for their
own; and have chosen rather to divert attention from these by triumphant
clamors about the forlorn condition of Jamaica. This magnificent island,
once the fairest possession of the British crown, now almost a
wilderness, has been the burden of their lamentations over the fatal
workings of emancipation. And truly if emancipation has really done so
much mischief in Jamaica as they claim, it is a most damaging fact.
Testimony of opposite results in the smaller islands would hardly
countervail it. Such testimony would be good to prove that the freedom
of the negro works well in densely peopled insular communities, where
the pressure of population compels industry. The opponents of
emancipation are willing sometimes to acknowledge that where the
laboring population are, as they say, in virtual slavery to the
planters, by the impossibility of obtaining land of their own, their
release from the degradation of being personally owned may act favorably
upon them. But they maintain that where the negro can easily escape from
the control of the planter, as in Jamaica, where plenty of land is
obtainable at low rates, his innate laziness is there invincible. This
very representation I remember to have seen a few years ago in a Jamaica
journal in the planting interest, which maintained that unless the
negroes of that island were also reduced to 'vi