telligent husbandmen, have become
vagrants and squatters, and it is now apprehended that with the failure
of cultivation in the island will come the failure of its resources for
instructing or controlling its population. So imminent does this
consummation appear, that memorials have been signed by classes of
colonial society hitherto standing aloof from politics, and not only the
bench and the bar, but the bishop, clergy, and ministers of all
denominations in the island, without exception, have recorded their
conviction, that, in the absence of timely relief, the religious and
educational institutions of the island must be abandoned, and the masses
of the population retrogade to barbarism."

One of the editors of the _New York Evening Post_, Mr. Bigelow, a few
years since, spent a winter in Jamaica, and continues to watch, with
anxious solicitude, as an anti-slavery man, the developments taking
place among its colored population. In reviewing the returns published
by the Jamaica House of Assembly, in 1853, in reference to the ruinous
decline in the agriculture of the island, and stating the enormous
quantity of lands thrown out of cultivation, since 1848, the _Post_
says:

"This decline has been going on from year to year, daily becoming more
alarming, until at length the island has reached what would appear to be
the last profound of distress and misery, . . . . when thousands of
people do not know, when they rise in the morning, whence or in what
manner they are to procure bread for the day."

We must examine, more closely, the economical results of emancipation,
in the West Indies, before we can judge of the effects, upon the trade
and commerce of the world, which would result from general emancipation
in the United States. We do this, not to afford an argument in behalf of
the perpetuation of slavery, because its abolition might injuriously
affect the interests of trade and commerce; but because the whole of
these results have long been well known to the American planter, and
serve as conclusive arguments, with him, against emancipation. He
believes that, in tropical cultivation, African free labor is worthless;
that the liberation of the slaves in this country, must, necessarily, be
followed with results similar to what has occurred in the West Indies;
and, for this reason, as well as on account of the profitable character
of slavery, he refuses to give freedom to his slaves. We repeat, we do
not cite the fact o