planter"--I quote from one of his letters to Lord Stanley--"to the heavy burdens which he was called to bear for the improvement of our establishments and the benefit of the mass of the population, it was necessary to persuade him that he had an interest in raising the standard of education and morals among the peasantry; and this belief could be imparted only by inspiring a taste for a more artificial system of husbandry." "By the silent operation of such salutary convictions," he added, "prejudices of old standing are removed; the friends of the negro and of the proprietary classes find themselves almost unconsciously acting in concert, and conspiring to complete that great and holy work of which the emancipation of the slave was but the commencement." At this time the relations between the island and the home governments were always in a very strained condition on account of the difficulty of making the colonial office fully sensible of the financial embarrassment caused by the upheaval of the labour and social systems, and of the wisest methods of assisting the colony in its straits. As it too often happened in those old times of colonial rule, the home government could with difficulty be brought to understand that the economic principles which might satisfy the state of affairs in Great Britain could not be hastily and arbitrarily applied to a country suffering under peculiar difficulties. The same unintelligent spirit which forced taxation on the thirteen colonies, which complicated difficulties in the Canadas before the rebellion of 1837, seemed for the moment likely to prevail, as soon as the legislature of Jamaica passed a tariff framed naturally with regard to conditions existing when the receipts and expenditures could not be equalized, and the financial situation could not be relieved from its extreme tension in any other way than by the imposition of duties which happened to be in antagonism with the principles then favoured by the imperial government. At this critical juncture Lord Elgin successfully interposed between the colonial office and the island legislature, and obtained permission for the latter to manage this affair in its own way. He recognized the fact, obvious enough to any one conversant with the affairs of the island, that the tariff in question was absolutely necessary to relieve it from financial ruin, and that any strenuous interference with the right of the assembly to control its own taxes and expenses would only tend to create complications in the government and the relations with the parent state. He was convinced, as he wrote to the colonial office, that an indispensable condition of his usefulness as a governor was "a just appreciation of the difficulties with which the legislature of the island had yet to contend, and of the sacrifices and exertions already made under the pressure of no ordinary embarrassments."