of
emancipation in the West Indies.

In BARBADOES the governing peculiarities are the dense population to the
area, and the great numbers of the laboring class. The number to the
square mile is greater than in China, averaging eight hundred. This fact
alone placed a much greater power in the masters' hands after
emancipation, as the competition of labor must be so much more severe
than with a more sparse population.

With something of the perversity induced by slavery, the planters
maintained a species of land-tenure among their freed slaves which could
not but have a disastrous effect.

In the first years succeeding the act of emancipation, the tenant worked
for twenty per cent. below the market-rate of wages, and his service was
considered equivalent to the rent. Now he possesses a house and a
land-allotment on an estate for which he pays a stipulated rent; but,
_as a condition of renting_, he must give a certain number of days'
work at certain wages, generally from one-sixth to one-third lower than
the market-rate. The usual wages are twenty-four cents a day; by this
system of tenancy-at-will, the freed negro in Barbadoes must labor for
twenty cents.

What would be the natural results of such a system? Can we wonder at
such facts as Mr. Sewell quotes from a Tobago paper, in which the writer
"deplores the perverse selfishness of the laborers," (i.e. in buying
farms of their own,) and complains that "the laborers have large patches
of land under cultivation, and hire help at higher wages than the
estates can afford to pay," and otherwise oppress their former
benefactors? The remedy which the aggrieved correspondent suggests is
the immediate importation of Coolies.

The truth is, however, that, owing to the crowded population of
Barbadoes, the planters have had everything in their own hands, much
more than in other islands. In Trinidad or British Guiana the negroes
were not obliged by competition to submit to the obnoxious tenure; and
they soon found, where land was so cheap, that a path to independence
lay open before them in working their own little properties. The
planters became more stubborn and more rigid, and the result was in many
cases the absolute abandonment of large estates for want of labor.

The industry of the Barbadoes population is shown in the fact, that, out
of the 106,000 acres of the island, 100,000 are under cultivation,[A]
while the average price of land rises to the unprecedented height of