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Show 234 LIBERTY AND SLAVERY. And besides, it was quite certain that the free negroes had eaten more sugar than while they were slaves, which helped mightily to account for the great diminution in the exports of the article. No one could deny this. It is certain, that if the free negroes only devoured sugar as eagerly as such floating conjectures were gulped down by the abolitionists, the whole phenomenon needed no other cause for its perfect explanation. It never once occurred, however, to these reasoners to imagine that the decrease in the amount of rum exported from another island might he owing to tho circumstance that the free blacks had swallowed a little more of that article as well as of sugar. On the contrary, this fact was held up as a most conclusive and triumphant proof that the free negroes had not only become temperate themselves, but also so virtuous that they scorned to produce such an article to poison their. fellow- men. The English abolitionists who rejoiced at such a reflection were, it must be confessed, standing on rather delicate gt·ound. For if such an inference proved any thing, it proved that the blacks of tho i•land in question had, at one single bound, passed from the depths of degmdation to an exaltation of vit-tne AROUl\fENT FROM TTIE PUBLIC GOOD. 235 far above their emancipators, tho English people themselves; since those, as every reader of history knows, not only enforced the cultme of opium in India, but also absolutely_ compelled the poor Chinese to receive it at the mouth of the cannon! It also appears that, for 1839, tho amount of coffee m;ported had fallen ofr 38,554 owt., or about one third of the whole amount of the preceding year. "The coftee is a very uncertain crop," said a noted English emancipationist, in view of this startling fact, "and the deficiency, on the comparison of these two years, is not greater, I believe, than has often occurred before." This is true, for a drought or a hurricane had before created quite as grent a deficiency. But while tho fact is true, it only proves that the first yenr of omanci pation was no worse on the coffee. crop than a drought or a hurricane. "We should also remember," says this zealous abolitionist, "that, both in sugar and oofteo, the profit to the planter may be increased by the snving of expense, oven where tho produce is diminished.~~ Such a thing, we admit, is possible; it may be true. But in point of jt<.:l, |