The causes of this extraordinary decline of production are abundantly clear, and the facts now adduced ought to cover with confusion those ignorant and pragmatical personages who averred that, under a system of free trade, no loss whatever would be sustained by the planters. No doubt, had free labour been ready and attainable, the loss would have been much diminished; but the misfortune was, that free labour could not be found within the colonies to any thing like the required extent; and neither time nor opportunity were afforded to the planters to obtain it elsewhere. The friends of the African have either persuaded themselves, or endeavoured to cheat the public into the belief, that the negro has attained a point of civilisation and docility from which a large proportion of the inhabitants of the British islands are at this moment very widely removed. They promised, on his behalf, that when emancipated, he would set down seriously to work, and, with a heart full of gratitude, proceed to earn his wages by toiling in the service of his employer. It is well for those gentlemen that they did not offer any tangible forfeit in the event of the failure of their protégé. The negro is perhaps more fully alive than any other class of mankind to the luxury of undisturbed idleness. He has few wants, and those few are easily supplied in such a splendid island as Jamaica, where his provision ground, with the smallest possible amount of cultivation, will afford him every necessary, and some of the luxuries of life. What he cannot raise for himself must, of course, be obtained by labour; but a very slight portion indeed of the primal curse now lights upon the emancipated negro, who has no ambition, and consequently no motive to persevere. Nor, indeed, can we wonder at this, if we only reflect seriously on the scenes which are visible at home. Do we not all know how difficult it is to rouse the western Highlander to any thing like active exertion? How many thousands of the Irish are there at this moment who will not work, preferring to depend for life itself upon the precarious existence of a miserable root, which, of all articles of human food, requires the smallest degree of culture? And can we, while such things happen among Christians, in a land where the severity of the climate ought to be of itself a sufficient inducement to exertion, wonder that the negroes, who have neither the same advantages, nor the same cogent motives for labour, should abandon themselves to a life of lazy sensuality, and look upon the neglected cane-fields and choked coffee-plantations with an eye of utter indifference?