d as soon think
of suspending his faith in Christ until he could resolve all the
difficulties of the first of Genesis, as of suspending his moral
judgment respecting the system which makes one man the brute instrument
of another's gain, till he knew just how the statistics of sugar and
coffee stand. Woe unto us if the fundamental principles which govern
human relations have themselves no better foundation than the
fluctuating figures of blue-books!

But if freedom is better than slavery, she will be sure to vindicate her
superiority in due time, and is little beholden to overzealous friends
who cannot be content meanwhile that present facts shall tell their own
story, whatever it be. There is much, very much, in the present
condition of Jamaica, to cause an honest man to think twice before
setting it down as testifying favorably for emancipation, or before
dismissing it as not testifying unfavorably against it.

And first, all rose-colored accounts of the Jamaica negro may be
summarily dismissed. He is not a proficient in industry, economy,
intelligence, morality, or religion, but, though rising, is yet far down
on the scale in all these respects. Nor is it true that all his peculiar
vices are to be referred to slavery. The sensuality, avarice, cunning,
and litigiousness of the Creole[1] negro correspond exactly with Du
Chaillu's and Livingstone's descriptions of the native African.[2] But
on the other hand, the accounts of these travellers bear witness to a
freshness and independence of spirit in the native African, which has
been crushed out of the enslaved negro. Several missionaries have gone
from Jamaica to Africa, and they speak with delight of the manliness
and vigor of character which they find among the blacks there, as
contrasted with the abjectness of those who have been oppressed by
slavery and infected with its sly and cringing vices. Although the
faults of the negro, except this servile abjectness, may not have been
created by slavery, yet slavery and heathenism are so identical in
character and tendency that there is scarcely a heathen vice, and, as we
have found of late to our sorrow, scarcely a heathen cruelty, which
slavery would not create if it did not exist, and of course scarcely one
already existing which it does not foster and intensify. The unsocial
selfishness of the emancipated black man, his untrustworthiness and want
of confidence in others, are traits that his race may have brought with
i