Although there are some few persons who deny that free labour is less expensive than slavery, yet the general voice pronounces it to be a system beneficial to the country. It has been proved to demonstration that estates which, under the old system, were clogged with debts they never could have paid off, have, since emancipation, not only cleared themselves, but put a handsome income into the pockets of the proprietors. Land has also increased greatly in value. Sugar plantations that would scarcely find a purchaser before emancipation, will now command from 10,000l. sterling, while many estates that were abandoned in days of slavery; are now once more in a state of cultivation; and the sugar-cane flourishes in verdant beauty, where for so many years nothing was to be seen but rank and tangled weeds, or scanty herbage. In days of slavery it required an immense capital to establish a sugar plantation, as well as a large annual expenditure to carry on the affairs of the estate when established. Perhaps a sugar estate had a gang of two hundred slaves upon it, yet out of this large number possibly there might not be more than sixty or seventy efficient negroes, the surplus being composed of helpless old men and women, children and infants, and emaciated and cureless invalids. Still the law obliged the owner to feed, clothe, house, and procure medical attendance for the entire number; and little as their allowance was, yet, in dry seasons in particular, when the crops of yams and other island provisions failed, the maintenance of so many persons was attended with great expense, while at the same time, perhaps, not more than one-third the number were of any use in agricultural employments. Under the free system, this tie upon the planter is entirely annulled; for he now employs but a sufficient number of labourers to carry on the estate-work, and the negroes support themselves, as well as their old people and children, out of their weekly earnings and the privileges which they still enjoy upon the properties where they are domiciled. But this diminishment of expense in the cultivation of the sugar-cane is not the only benefit which emancipation has brought to the colony. Setting aside religious principles—which evidently point out the _sinfulness_ of slavery, as it is known among modern nations—there were many, very many circumstances, which tended to render the system obnoxious in the highest degree.