of the British colonies is obvious from the fact that Dutch
Surinam, where the old system of slavery remains in its original rigor,
is in an equally depressed condition. The 'Paramaribo Neuws en
Advertentie Blad', quoted in the Jamaica Gazette, says, under date of
January 2, 1850: "Around us we hear nothing but complaints. People seek
and find matter in everything to picture to themselves the lot of the
place in which they live as bitterer than that of any other country. Of
a large number of flourishing plantations, few remain that can now be
called such. So deteriorated has property become within the last few
years, that many of these estates have not been able to defray their
weekly expenses. The colony stands on the brink of a yawning abyss, into
which it must inevitably plunge unless some new and better system is
speedily adopted. It is impossible that our agriculture can any longer
proceed on its old footing; our laboring force is dying away, and the
social position they held must undergo a revolution."

The paper from which we have quoted, the official journal of the colony,
thinks the condition of the emancipated British colonies decidedly
preferable to that of Surinam, where the old slave system has continued
in force, and insists that the Dutch government must follow the example
of Great Britain. The actual condition of the British colonies since
emancipation is perfectly well known in Surinam: three of them,
Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice, being its immediate neighbors, whatever
evils and inconveniences have resuited from emancipation must be well
understood by the Dutch slave-holders; yet we find them looking towards
emancipation as the only prospect of remedy for the greater evils of
their own system.

This fact is of itself a sufficient answer to the assumption of Carlyle
and others, that what they call "the ruin of the colonies" has been
produced by the emancipation acts of 1833 and 1838.

We have no fears whatever of the effect of this literary monstrosity,
which we have been considering upon the British colonies. Quashee, black
and ignorant as he may be, will not "get himself made a slave again."
The mission of the "beneficent whip" is there pretty well over; and it
may now find its place in museums and cabinets of ghastly curiosities,
with the racks, pillories, thumbscrews, and branding-irons of old days.
What we have feared, however, is, that the advocates and defenders of
slave-holding in