Having hitherto dealt with the subjects of the currency and finance, let us now glance for a moment at the new legislation for our colonies. We need not repeat the tale of the disasters into which the West Indies have been plunged, or the ruin which has befallen many of our own most respectable citizens, who, to their misfortune, had embarked their capital and fortunes in sugar-growing estates, trusting to British faith and protection for at least an adequate return. The veriest zealot could not have wished to have seen the crime of slavery more bitterly avenged; but in what a manner! Great Britain, after having made a sacrifice of twenty millions to emancipate the slave population in her own colonies,—a sacrifice to her, though not an adequate compensation to the planters,—after having declared to the whole world her determination no longer to participate in the profits of forced labour,—after having made treaties, and equipped armaments for the suppression of the slave-trade,—suddenly changed her policy, admitted slave-grown sugar from foreign states, first, at a high, and, latterly, at so low a duty, that her own colonies, already impoverished, could no longer afford to defray the cost of production. Here, again, the principle of free trade has been triumphant and ruinous; here, again, the exporting trades have carried their point, not only against the interests of the colonists, but against those of benevolence and Christianity. The cause of the Blacks has been abandoned for the tempting bribe of cheap sugars, of an augmented demand for cottons and blankets to supply the gangs of Cuba, and of machinery for Brazil, to enable the planter more utterly to prostrate Jamaica.