I went out thither with a somewhat foregone conclusion in that direction.  But it was at least founded on what I believed to be facts.  And it was, certainly, verified by the fresh facts which I saw there.  I returned with a belief stronger than ever, that exclusive sugar cultivation had put a premium on unskilled slave-labour, to the disadvantage of skilled white-labour; and to the disadvantage, also, of any attempt to educate and raise the Negro, whom it was not worth while to civilise, as long as he was needed merely as an instrument exerting brute strength.  It seems to me, also, that to the exclusive cultivation of sugar is owing, more than to any other cause, that frightful decrease throughout the islands of the white population, of which most English people are, I believe, quite unaware.  Do they know, for instance, that Barbadoes could in Cromwell’s time send three thousand white volunteers, and St. Kitts and Nevis a thousand, to help in the gallant conquest of Jamaica?  Do they know that in 1676 Barbadoes was reported to maintain, as against 80,000 black, 70,000 free whites; while in 1851 the island contained more than 120,000 Negroes and people of colour, as against only 15,824 whites?  That St. Kitts held, even as late as 1761, 7000 whites; but in 1826—­before emancipation—­only 1600?  Or that little Montserrat, which held, about 1648, 1000 white families, and had a militia of 360 effective men, held in 1787 only 1300 whites, in 1828 only 315, and in 1851 only 150?

It will be said that this ugly decrease in the white population is owing to the unfitness of the climate.  I believe it to have been produced rather by the introduction of sugar cultivation, at which the white man cannot work.  These early settlers had grants of ten acres apiece; at least in Barbadoes.  They grew not only provisions enough for themselves, but tobacco, cotton, and indigo—­products now all but obliterated out of the British islands.  They made cotton hammocks, and sold them abroad as well as in the island.  They might, had they been wisely educated to perceive and use the natural wealth around them, have made money out of many other wild products.  But the profits of sugar-growing were so enormous, in spite of their uncertainty, that, during the greater part of the eighteenth century, their little freeholds were bought up, and converted into cane-pieces by their wealthier neighbours, who could afford to buy slaves and sugar-mills.  They sought their fortunes in other lands:  and so was exterminated a race of yeomen, who might have been at this day a source of strength and honour, not only to the colonies, but to England herself.