which have decreased,” gentle reader, according to the despatch, “in an accelerated ratio within the last few years, till in the year 1836, when they do not average one half the returns of former years preceding that of 1823, the year that Mr. Canning’s resolutions for the ultimate abolition of slavery in the British colonies passed the House of Commons,” still it is a matter of sincere gratification to know, that the sugar planters are better off now than they have been for the last fourteen or fifteen years.  With the compensation money a great many of them have been enabled to pay off their English debts, and the remainder very considerably to reduce them, whilst the reduction in the quantity of sugar produced, has occasioned such a rise in the price of that article as will place the former in easy circumstances, and enable the latter entirely to free themselves from the trammels of English mortgagees, and the tender mercies of English mortgagees before the 1st August, 1840, arrives.  And ought these parties not to be thankful?  Unquestionably they ought.  Ingratitude, we are told, is as the sin of witchcraft, and although the table of exports exhibits our fair island as hastening to a state of ruin, and the despatch tells us that “by the united influence of mock philanthropy, religious cant, and humbug,” a reformed parliament was forced “to precipitate the slavery spoliation act under the specious pretext of promoting the industry and improving the condition of the manumitted slaves,” still we maintain, and the reasonable will agree with us, that we are much better off now than we have been for a long time, and that Jamaica’s brightest and happiest days have not yet dawned.  Let the croakers remember the remarkable words of the Tory Lord, Belmore, the planter’s friend, and be silent—­“The resources of this fine island will never be fully developed until slavery ceases.”  The happiness and prosperity of the inhabitants of Jamaica are not contingent, nor need they be, upon the number of hogsheads of sugar annually exported from her shores.

* * * * *

To the foregoing we add the remarks of the editor of the “Spanishtown Telegraph,” on the present state of the colony, made in his paper of May 9, 1837:—­

“When it was understood that the island of Jamaica and the other British West Indian colonies were to undergo the blessed transition from slavery to freedom, it was the hourly cry of the pro-slavery party and press, that the ruin of Jamaica would, as a natural consequence, follow liberty!  Commerce, said they, will cease; hordes of barbarians will come upon us and drive us from our own properties; agriculture will be completely paralyzed; and Jamaica, in the space of a few short months, will be seen buried in ashes—­irretrievably ruined.  Such were the awful predictions of an unjust, illiberal faction!!  Such the first fruits that were to follow the incomparable blessings of liberty!