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t years of freedom; and, so far is it from being equal to what it was while slavery prevailed, and especially while the slave trade was continued, that it now falls short of the production of that period by an immense amount. In no way, therefore, can it be claimed, that the cultivation of the British West India islands is on the increase, except by resorting to the pious fraud of crediting the products of the immigrant labor to the account of emancipation--a resort to which no conscientious Christian man will have recourse, even to sustain a philanthropic theory. But the Island of Barbadoes is an exception. It is said to have suffered no diminution in its production since emancipation, and that this result was attained without the aid of immigrant labor. The _London Economist_ must be permitted to explain this phenomenon; and must also be allowed to give its views on the subject of the effects of emancipation, after the lapse of a quarter of a century from the date of the passage of the Emancipation Act: "We are no believers in Mr. Carlyle's gospel of the 'beneficent whip' as the bearer of salvation to tropical indolence. But we can not for a moment doubt that the first result of emancipation was, in most of the islands, to substitute for the worst kind of moral and political evil, one of a less fatal but still of a very pernicious kind. The negroes had been treated as mere machines for raising sugar and coffee. They were suddenly liberated from that mechanical drudgery; they became free beings--but without the discipline needful to use freedom well, and unfortunately with a larger amount of practical freedom than the laboring class of any Northern or temperate climate could by any possibility enjoy. They suddenly found themselves, in most of the islands, in a position in many respects analagous to that of a people possessed of a moderate property in England, who can supply their principal wants without any positive labor, and have no ambition to rise into any higher sphere than that into which they were born. The only difference was, that the negroes in most of the West India islands wanted vastly less than such people as these in civilized States,--wanted nothing in fact, but the plantains they could grow almost without labor, and the huts which they could build on any waste mountain land without paying rent for it. The consequence naturally was, that when the spur of physical tyranny was removed, there was no su
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