345 l. 6s. 8d.”  This is the statement given by Mr. Steele, and a most important one it is; for if we compare what the estate had cleared in the first, with what it had cleared in the last of these periods, and have recourse to figures, we shall find that Mr. Steele had more than tripled the income of it, in consequence of his new management, during his residence in Barbadoes.  And this is in fact what he says himself in words at full length, in his answer to the 17th question proposed to him by the committee of the Privy-council on the affairs of the slave trade.  “In a plantation,” says he, “of 200 slaves in June 1780, consisting of 90 men, 82 women, 56 boys, and 60 girls, though under the exertions of an able and honest manager, there were only 15 births, and no less than 57 deaths, in three years and three months.  An alteration was made in the mode of governing the slaves.  The whips were taken from all the white servants.  All arbitrary punishments were abolished, and all offences were tried and sentence passed by a Negro court.  In four years and three months after this change of government, there were 44 births, and only 41 deaths, of which ten deaths were of superannuated men and women, some above 80 years old.  But in the same interval the annual neat clearance of the estate was above three times more than it had been for ten years before!!!”

Dr. Dickson, the editor of Mr. Steele, mentions these profits also, and in the same terms, and connects them with an eulogium on Mr. Steele, which is worthy of our attention.  “Mr. Steele,” says he, “saw that the Negroes, like all other human beings, were to be stimulated to permanent exertion only by a sense of their own interests in providing for their own wants and those of their offspring.  He therefore tried rewards, which immediately roused the most indolent to exertion.  His experiments ended in regular wages, which the industry he had excited among his whole gang enabled him to pay.  Here was a natural, efficient, and profitable reciprocity of interests.  His people became contented; his mind was freed from that perpetual vexation and that load of anxiety, which are inseparable from the vulgar system, and in little more than four years the annual neat clearance of his property was more than tripled.”  Again, in another part of the work, “Mr. Steele’s plan may no doubt receive some improvements, which his great age obliged him to decline”—­“but it is perfect, as far as it goes. To advance above 300 field-negroes, who had never before moved without the whip, to a state nearly resembling that of contented, honest and industrious servants, and, after paying for their labour, to triple in a few years the annual neat clearance of the estate,—­these, I say, were great achievements for an aged man in an untried field of improvement, pre-occupied by inveterate vulgar prejudice.  He has indeed accomplished all that was really doubtful or difficult in the undertaking, and perhaps all that is at present desirable either for owner or slave; for he has ascertained as a fact, what was before only known to the learned as a theory, and to practical men as a paradox, that the paying of slaves for their labour does actually produce a very great profit to their owners.”