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Show 2'18 LIBERTY AND SLAVERY. committees show, beyond all doubt, that unexampled distress existed in the colonies. The report of 1848 declares: "That many estates in the British West India colonies have been alt·eady abandoned, that many more are in the course of abandonment, and that from this cause a very serious diminution is to be apprehended in tho total amount of production. That the first eftect of this diminution will be an increase in the price of sugat·, and the ultimate effect a greater extension to the growth of sugar in slave countries, and a greater impetus to slavery and the slave-trade." From the same report, we also learn that the prosperity of the Mauritius, no less than that of the West India Islands, had suffered a feat-ful blight, in consequence of the "glorious act of emancipation." A third commission was appointed, in 1850, to inquire into the condition and prospects of British Guiana. Lord Stanley, in his second letter to Mr. Gladstone, the Secretary of the British Colonies, has furnished us with the following eJ.'tracts from the report of this committee:- "Of Guiana generally they say-' It would be but a melancholy task to dwell upon the misery and ruin which so alarming a change must have AROUi\lENT FROM TJTE PUBLIC GOOD. 24\) occasioned to the proprietary body; but your commissioners feel themselves called upon to notice the effects which this wholesale abandonment of property has produced upon the colony at large. Where whole districts are fast rc. lapsing into bush, and occasional patches of provisions around the huts of village settlers arc all that remain to tell of once flourishing estates, it is not to be wondered at that the most ordinary marks of civilization are rapidly disappearing, and that in many districts of tho colony all travelling communication by land will soon become utterly impracticable.' "Of the Abary district:-' Your commission find that the line of road is nearly impassable, and that a long succession of formerly cultivated estates presents now a series of pestilent swamps, overrun with bush, and productive of malignant fevers.' "Nor are matters," says Lord Stanley, "much better farther south. " ' Proceeding still lower down: yont· commissioners find that the public roads and bridges are in such a condition that the few estates still remaining on the upper west bank of Mahaica Creek are completely cut oft; save in the vet·y dry season; and that with regard to the whole |