Obvious as these considerations are, it is perfectly clear that Major Moody has overlooked them. From the Appendix to his own Report it appears, that in every West Indian island the wages of the artisan are much greater than those of the cultivator. In Tortola, for example, a carpenter earns three shillings sterling a day, a cartwright or a cooper four shillings and sixpence, a sawyer six shillings; an ablebodied field negro, under the most advantageous circumstances, nine pounds a year, about seven pence a day, allowing for holidays. And because a free African prefers six shillings to seven pence, we are told that he has a natural and invincible aversion to agriculture!--because he prefers wealth to poverty, we are to conclude that he prefers repose to wealth. Such is the mode of reasoning which the Major designates as the philosophy of labour. But, says the Major, all employments, excepting those of the cultivator and the domestic servant, are only occasional. There is little demand for the labour of the carpenter, the cooper, and the sawyer. Let us suppose the demand to be so incredibly small, that the carpenter can obtain work only one day in six, the cooper one day in nine, and the sawyer one day in twelve; still the amount of their earnings will be greater than if they broke clods almost daily through the whole year. Of two employments which yield equal wages, the inhabitants of all countries, both within and without the tropics, will choose that whieh requires the least labour Major Moody seems throughout his Report to imagine, that people in the temperate zone work for the sake of working; that they consider labour, not as an evil to be endured for the sake of a good produced by it, but as a blessing, from which the wages are a sort of drawback; that they would rather work three days for a shilling, than one day for half a crown. The case, he may be assured, is by no means such as he supposes. If he will make proper inquiries he will {380}learn, that, even where the thermometer stands at the lowest, no man will choose a laborious employment, when he can obtain equal remuneration with less trouble in another line. But it, is unnecessary to resort to this argument; for it is perfectly clear, on Major Moody’s own showing, that the demand for mechanical industry, though occasional and small, is still sufficient to render the business of an artisan much more lucrative than that of a field labourer. “I have shown,” says he, “that the sugar-planter himself, obtaining 287 days labour on the very cheapest terms, could not have afforded to give more than about 9l. per annum for labourers, and therefore, that he never could hope to induce any liberated African to work steadily for such wages, when the liberated African could obtain from 15l. to 21l. per annum by the irregular labour of occasionally cutting firewood, grass, or catching fish, &c....