We need not detain our readers with any account of the manner in which emancipation was carried out. It was submitted to by the colonists, not without apprehension, but in the best possible spirit. Every thing was done to facilitate the plans of Government; and on the 1st of August 1834, there was no longer a slave throughout the whole of the British dominions. In closing that eventful session of the Jamaica House of Assembly, the Governor, Lord Mulgrave, used the following terms:—“In conclusion, I must express my firm belief that, in your future difficulties, your ready recognition of the natural rights of your fellow men will meet its best reward in the revived diffusion of national sympathy, and the cheerfully continued extension of British protection.” These are honeyed words—let us now see how the promise has been kept. Immediately after the Emancipation Act was passed, the produce of the West Indian estates began rapidly to decline, and their value to be correspondingly depreciated. This was the inevitable consequence of the abridgment of the working hours, and of the withdrawal of a great number of labourers altogether from plantation employment. In fact, the want of adequate labour began to be felt most painfully throughout the colonies. Notwithstanding this the planters went on, making every exertion they could, under peculiarly difficult circumstances. The increased expense, occasioned by the altered circumstances of the colonies, soon absorbed more than the compensation-money which they had received, and in addition, they were urged by Government to provide “more fully for the administration of justice, for the consolidation of the criminal law, for establishing circuit courts, amending the workhouse laws, improving the state of gaols for better prison discipline, establishing weekly courts of petit sessions, providing places of confinement for prisoners, raising an efficient police, &c.;” things, no doubt, very desirable in themselves, but not to be accomplished save at a grievous cost, which, of course, was thrown entirely upon the shoulders of the planters. The following extract from the answer of the Jamaica Assembly, in reply to the Governor’s address at the opening of that chamber on 4th August 1835, will show the state of the colonies at the close of the year immediately subsequent to emancipation: “Seeing large portions of our neglected cane-fields becoming overrun with weeds, and a still larger portion of our pasture lands returning to a state of nature; seeing, in fact, desolation already overspreading the face of the land, it is impossible for us, without abandoning the evidence of our own senses, to entertain favourable anticipations, or to divest ourselves of the painful conviction, that progressive and rapid deterioration of property will continue to keep pace with the apprenticeship, and that its termination must (unless strong preventive measures be applied) complete the ruin of the colony.”