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Show 40 mother presses her child to her heart as indeed her own? Is it nothing, that churches are springing up, not from the donations of the opulent, but from the hard earnings of the religious poor? What if a few owners of sugar estates export less than formerly? Are the many always to be sacrificed to the few? Suppose the luxuries of the splendid mansion to be retrenched. Is it no compensation that the comforts of the laborer's hut are increased? Emancipation was resisted on the ground, that the slave, if restored to his rights, would fall into idleness and vagrancy, and even relapse into barbarism. But the emancipated negro discovers no indifference to the comforts of civilized life. He has wants various enough to keep him in action. His standard of living has risen. He desires a better lodging, dress, and food. He has begun too to thirst fot· accumulation. As Mr. Gurney says, " he understands his interest as well as a yankee." He is more likely to fall into the civilized man's cupidity than into the sloth and filth of a savage. Is it an offset for all these benefits, that the custom house reports a diminution of the staples of slavery? What a country most needs, is not an increase of its exports, but the well being of all classes of its population and especially of the most numerous class ; and these things are not one and the same. It is a striking fact, that while the exports of the 41 emancipated islands have decreased, the imports are greater than before. In Jamaica, during slavery, the industry of the laborers was given chiefly to a staple, which was sent to absentee proprietors, who expended the proceeds very much in a luxurious life in England. At present, not a little of this industry is employed on articles of subsistence and comfort for the working class and their families ; and, at the same time, such an amount of labor is sold by this class to the planter, and so fast are they acquiring a taste for better modes of living, that they need and can pay for great imports from the mother country. Surely when we see the fruits of industry diffusing themselves more and more through the mass of a community, finding their way to the very hovel, and raising the multitude of men to new civilization and self respect, we cannot grieve much, even though it should appear, that on the whole the amount of exports or even of products is decreased. It is not the quantity, but the distribution, the use of products, which determines the prosperity of a state. For example, were the grain, which is now grown among us for distillation, annually destroyed by fire, or were every ship, freighted with distilled liquors, to sink on approaching our shores, so that the crew might be saved, how immensely would the happiness, honor, and real strength of the country be increased by the loss, even were this not to be replac- 4* |