We believe banks were not known in the West Indies before the 1st of August 1834.  Says the Spanishtown Telegraph of May 1st, 1837, “Banks, Steam-Companies, Rail-Roads, Charity Schools, etc., seem all to have remained dormant until the time arrived when Jamaica was to be enveloped in smoke!  No man thought of hazarding his capital in an extensive banking establishment until Jamaica’s ruin, by the introduction of freedom, had been accomplished!” And it was not till after the 1st of August, 1838, that Jamaica had either savings banks or savings.  These institutions for the industrious classes came only with their manhood.  But why came they at all, if Emancipated industry is, or is likely to be, unsuccessful?—­In Barbados we notice the same forwardness in founding monied institutions.  A Bank is there proposed, with a capital of L200,000.  More than this, the all absorbing subject in all the West India papers at the present moment is that of the currency.  Why such anxiety to provide the means of paying for labor which is to become valueless?  Why such keenness for a good circulating medium if they are to have nothing to sell?  The complaints about the old fashioned coinage we venture to assort have since the first of August occupied five times as much space in the colonial papers, we might probably say in each and every one of them, as those of the non-working of the freemen.  The inference is irresistible. The white colonists take it for granted that industry is to thrive.

It may be proper to remark that the late refusal of the Jamaica legislature to fulfil its appropriate functions has no connection with the working of freedom, any further than it may have been a struggle to get rid in some measure of the surveillance of the mother country in order to coerce the labourer so far as possible by vagrant laws, &c.  The immediate pretext was the passing of a law by the imperial Parliament for the regulation of prisons, which the House of Assembly declared a violation of that principle of their charter which forbids the mother-country to lay a tax on them without their consent, in as much as it authorized a crown officer to impose a fine, in a certain case, of L20.  A large majority considered this an infringement of their prerogatives, and among them were some members who have nobly stood up for the slave in times of danger.  The remarks of Mr. Osborn especially, on this subject, (he is the full blooded, slave-born, African man to whom we have already referred) are worthy of consideration in several points of view.  Although he had always been a staunch advocate of the home government on the floor of the Assembly are now contended for the rights of the Jamaica legislature with arguments which to us republicans are certainly quite forcible.  In a speech of some length, which appears very creditable to him throughout, he said—­