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Show 238 LIBERTY AND SLAVERY. mining its prosperity and glory. 'Ve shall now proceed to adduce the evidence of this melancholy fact, which has in a few short years become so abundant and so overwhelming, that even the most blind and obstinate must feel its force. After describing the immense sources of wealth to be found iu Jamaica, an intelligent eye-witness says: "Such are some of the natural resources of this dilapidated and povertystricken country. Capable as it is of producing almost every thing, and actnally producing nothing which might not become a staple with a proper application of capital and skill, its inhabitants are miserably poor, and daily sinking deeper and deeper into the utter helplessness of abject want. " ' Mngnns inter opes inops.' "Shipping has deserted her ports; her magnificent plantations of sugar and coftee are running to weeds; her private dwellings are falling to decay; the comforts and luxuries which belong to industrial prosperity have been cut off, one by one, from her inhabitants; and the day, I think, is at hand when there will he none left to represent the wealth, intelli- Al\OUMENT Fl\OM TllE PUBLIC GOOD. 230 gence, and hospitality for which the Jamaica planter was once distinguished."* "It is impossible," says Mr. Carey, "to rend Mr. Bigelow's volume, without arriving at the conclusion that the freedom granted to tho negro has had little effect except that of enabling him to live at the expense of the planter so long as any thing remained. Sixteen years of freedom did not appear to its author to have 'advanced the dignity of labor or of the laboring classes one particle,' while it had ruined the proprietors of the laud, and thus great damage had been done to the one class without benefit of any kind to the other." From a statistical table, published in Au Q'USt 1853, it appears, says one of our northern Jour: nals, that, since 1846, "the number of sugar estates on the island that have been totally a~andoned amounts to one hundred and sixtymght, and the number partially abandoned to siA-ty-tbree; the value of which two hundred and thirty-one estates was assessed, in 1841, at .£ 1,655,140, or nearly eight millions and a half of dollars. Within the same period two bun· *Bigelow's Notes on Jamaica in 1850, as quoted in Carey's "Slave Trade, Foreign and Domestic." |