What, then, are the facts bearing on this important point?  We propose, under the guidance of candid observers and travellers, such as Schomburg, Breen, Cochin, Burnley, and, best of all, Sewell, briefly to examine a field where the experiment has been fairly tried, namely, the smaller islands of the British West Indies.  A full examination of the larger island, Jamaica,—­would of itself demand an entire article, or even a volume.

The remark is often repeated by West Indian travellers, that no sweeping conclusions on economical points can ever be true of the West Indies as a whole,—­that each island is distinct from the others, and to be judged on principles which apply to itself alone.  This important fact must be borne in mind by the reader, in examining the question of the results of emancipation in the West Indies.

In Barbadoes the governing peculiarities are the dense population to the area, and the great numbers of the laboring class.  The number to the square mile is greater than in China, averaging eight hundred.  This fact alone placed a much greater power in the masters’ hands after emancipation, as the competition of labor must be so much more severe than with a more sparse population.

With something of the perversity induced by slavery, the planters maintained a species of land-tenure among their freed slaves which could not but have a disastrous effect.

In the first years succeeding the act of emancipation, the tenant worked for twenty per cent. below the market-rate of wages, and his service was considered equivalent to the rent.  Now he possesses a house and a land-allotment on an estate for which he pays a stipulated rent; but, as a condition of renting, he must give a certain number of days’ work at certain wages, generally from one-sixth to one-third lower than the market-rate.  The usual wages are twenty-four cents a day; by this system of tenancy-at-will, the freed negro in Barbadoes must labor for twenty cents.

What would be the natural results of such a system?  Can we wonder at such facts as Mr. Sewell quotes from a Tobago paper, in which the writer “deplores the perverse selfishness of the laborers,” (i.e. in buying farms of their own,) and complains that “the laborers have large patches of land under cultivation, and hire help at higher wages than the estates can afford to pay,” and otherwise oppress their former benefactors?  The remedy which the aggrieved correspondent suggests is the immediate importation of Coolies.

The truth is, however, that, owing to the crowded population of Barbadoes, the planters have had everything in their own hands, much more than in other islands.  In Trinidad or British Guiana the negroes were not obliged by competition to submit to the obnoxious tenure; and they soon found, where land was so cheap, that a path to independence lay open before them in working their own little properties.  The planters became more stubborn and more rigid, and the result was in many cases the absolute abandonment of large estates for want of labor.