f the failure, economically, of free labor in
Jamaica, as an argument for the perpetuation of slavery. Not at all. We
allude to the fact, only to show that emancipation has greatly reduced
the commerce of the colonies, and that the logic of this result
militates against the colored man's prospects of advancement in the
scale of political and social equality. But to the facts:

The British planters, up to 1806, had received from the slave traders an
uninterrupted supply of laborers, and had rapidly extended their
cultivation as commerce increased its demands for their products. Let us
take the results in Jamaica as an example of the whole of the British
West India islands. She had increased her exports of sugar from a yearly
average of 123,979,000 lbs. in 1772-3, to 234,700,000 lbs. in 1805-6. No
diminution of exports had occurred, as has been asserted by some
anti-slavery writers, before the prohibition of the slave trade. The
increase was progressive and undisturbed, except so far as affected by
seasons, more or less favorable. But no sooner was her supply of slaves
cut off, by the act of 1806, which took effect in 1808, than the exports
of Jamaica began to diminish, until her sugar had fallen off from 1822
to 1832, to an annual average of 131,129,000 lbs., or nearly to what
they had been sixty years before. It was not until 1833 that the
Emancipation Act was passed; so that this decline in the exports of
Jamaica, took place under all the rigors of West India slavery. The
exports of rum, coffee, and cotton, were diminished in nearly the same
ratio.

To arrest this ruinous decline in the commercial prosperity of the
islands, emancipation was adopted in 1833 and perfected in 1838. This
policy was pursued under the plea, that free labor is doubly as
productive as slave labor; and, that the negroes, liberated, would labor
twice as well as when enslaved. But what was the result? Ten years after
final emancipation was effected, the exports of sugar from Jamaica were
only 67,539,200 lbs. a year, instead of 234,700,000 lbs., as in 1805-6.
The exports of coffee, during the same year, were reduced to 5,684,921
lbs., instead of 23,625,377 lbs., as in 1805-6; and the extinction of
the cultivation of cotton, for export, had become almost complete,
though in 1800, it had nearly equaled that of the United States. These
are no fancy sketches, drawn for effect, but sober realities, attested
by the public documents of the British gover