These are no new speculations. Mr. Long, above thirty years ago, dilated on the evils of this system in the strongest terms. He even went so far as to recommend, with a view to the prevention of them, a temporary stoppage of the importation of Slaves from Africa; and he confirmed his reasoning by appealing to the experience of one of our North American colonies, which, when involved in the deepest distress by the operation of similar circumstances, had been retrieved from a state of almost utter ruin by the adoption of a similar expedient. We have had an opportunity of receiving but too decisive a proof of the bad effects of suffering the opposite system to go on without restraint. Even twenty-six years ago they had exhibited a display of ruin, which was scarcely equalled by the effects of any regular and permanent cause of evil, in any other age or country. It would scarcely have appeared credible, if it were not established by the records of a public court, that in twenty years, from 1760 to 1780, the executions on estates in the Sheriff’s court amounted in number to above 80,000, and were to the amount in value of £.32,500,000 currency, or about £.22,500,000 sterling. Again; of all the sugar estates in the island at the beginning of the same period of twenty years, nearly one half were, at the end of it, either thrown up as not worth cultivating, or were in the hands of creditors, or mortgagees, or had been sold for their benefit.[45] This was many years before the abolition of the Slave Trade had ever been proposed; and one would have conceived, that the consequences of the system which had been so long pursued, might alone have produced a disrelish for it, and have predisposed the Colonists to adopt another which was recommended by the highest authorities. Prejudice, however, and party spirit, were too powerful for reason and sound policy, as well as for humanity and justice. And what has been the result? The affairs of the colonies have gone on from bad to worse, until the distress being extremely aggravated by another cause, to be presently noticed, the great island of Jamaica is represented, by its own legislature, in a state, to use the compendious terms of a very able and experienced West Indian proprietor, of general distress and foreclosure of property. During all this time a debt to the mother country, before prodigious, has been gradually accumulating; or rather, perhaps, to say the truth, the merchants of London have for the most part become the real proprietors of colonial estates; while the resident, and even sometimes the absentee planters, have been little more in reality than their stewards and agents.