You will naturally be astonished at the facts which have been here stated; you will naturally ask, what temptations can have been sufficiently strong to prompt men to go on in such a continued course, with speculations which have proved in the main so unprofitable? It is really difficult to account satisfactorily for the phœnomenon. Much is certainly to be ascribed to the operation of that principle in our nature, the gambling principle as it may be termed, the existence and effects of which have been so well explained by Dr. Adam Smith; the disposition to overrate our probable success, and to assign too little weight to contingencies which may disappoint our expectations. However, in the present instance, besides this general cause, we may discover several specific causes of sure and highly powerful operation. The West Indies are a very wide field, and some few instances of great and rapid success attract more notice than the far more numerous cases which terminate in ruin. The British merchant’s profit from consignments ensures a somewhat ready disposition to assist adventurers in planting. When also, as often happens, there is a glut of Slaves in the West Indian market, as they are an expensive article while they remain unsold, the planter can buy them on a proportionably longer credit. Two and even three years are not seldom allowed; the Planter therefore is tempted to purchase Slaves even if he does not greatly want them, in the hope, that before the time of payment arrives, they will have more than worked out their cost, by the sugars which their labour will have brought to market. In like manner the British merchant trusts, that before the bills drawn on him shall become due, the sugars in his hands will meet them. Thus encouraged, the planter buys. Meanwhile the Slaves must be set to work; and the inadequate funds of their master, the same cause which curtails their food and abridges their other comforts, causes them to be worked the harder. They sicken and drop off, and perish in what is called the _seasoning_, a mode of death sufficiently important and notorious to have obtained this epithet; a somewhat singular one, considering that the climate of the West Indies and Africa are so much the same. Yet this is a system, which, ruinous as it is, has a natural tendency to increase; which may grow even to an indefinite extent. The evils of it, however, though too long unacknowledged, are now at least felt by all who are not blinded by interest or passion. An immense mass of the national capital has thus been invested, I had almost said has been sunk, in our Trans-Atlantic Empire. In one respect it may be said, that, in accordance with the principles so clearly developed by the great political Economist who has been already named, our commercial accumulations have found their way to the land, and have become an agricultural capital. But it is to land many thousand miles removed from the mother country.