y day; the
families that compose it all own a horse or a mule; they have their
bank-books and their accounts with the savings banks. Lastly, which is
of more value than all else, the free negroes of Jamaica have built more
than two hundred chapels, and as many schools. At the very moment when I
write these lines, an enthusiastic religious movement is prevailing
among them; the rum-shops are abandoned, the most degraded classes
enter in their turn the path of reformation.

I should have been glad to cite our own colonies instead of confining
myself to the English islands. I have been prevented from this, not only
by the memory of the conflagrations of 1859 at Martinique, and of the
state of siege which it became necessary to proclaim there, but, above
all, by the circumstance that the liberty of our former slaves has been
too often restrained by means of the vagabond regulations, that labor
has continued to be imposed on them to a certain point; that the
parcelling out of property has been trammelled by fiscal measures; that,
moreover, it is less the labor of our former slaves than of the Coolies
and others employed, which has secured the success of our experiment;
whence it follows that this success is far from being as conclusive as
that which has been obtained elsewhere under the system of full liberty.
Nevertheless, our success, which is no less real, signifies something
also. If we have not yet those little free villages, that class of small
negro landholders of which I just spoke, we have, like the English, free
negroes in our militia and in our marine; like them, we have had our
elections, and all classes of the population have taken part in them;
like them, and perhaps in a greater degree, we have increased our sugar
production since emancipation. It is true that the crisis of free trade
has not yet passed among us, and that we cannot know how this would be
supported by our colonial sugars. But it will not be long before we
shall be informed on this point: by an act which we cannot but applaud,
and which continues the work it has undertaken, the French government
has just suppressed the protection continued hitherto to our planters.
If, ere long, as it is justifiable to hope, they are delivered from the
charges of the colonial system, whose advantages they have lost, we
shall see them struggle, and successfully, I am convinced, against the
Spanish sugars produced by slave labor.

It will be, perhaps, maintained,