After this awful lesson the Government began to train black soldiers to take the place of white in future West Indian expeditions; while the white garrisons were largely composed of foreigners and battalions of convicts. But while struggling to create an army at home by the mistaken methods which I have already described to you, Addington opened the second part of the war by capturing St Lucia, Tobago and Dutch Guiana, thus multiplying unhealthy stations which ate steadily into our own strength without diminishing that of the enemy. Ultimately a series of expeditions, exceedingly well managed, swept the whole of the West Indies, excepting the Spanish, into our net, and put an end to all warfare in that quarter for the remainder of the war. By the peace of 1814 Martinique and Guadeloupe were restored to France, but were recaptured by us in 1815 during the Hundred Days, and then finally given back to be captured no more. The sequel is melancholy enough. For about a quarter of a century after Waterloo our miserable pittance of an army was hidden away in great measure in the Islands; and then suddenly the British nation in one of those fits of conscientiousness to which it is occasionally subject, decided practically to destroy these possessions by abolishing slavery and repealing the duties which protected their produce. The abolition of slavery was no doubt a good thing, but as it extended at first to the English islands only, its immediate effect was to give a tremendous impulse to the slave trade, with all its horrors, in the French, Dutch and Spanish islands. To all intent it penalised our own islands to the advantage of the Spanish islands, and favoured our few negroes to the prejudice of ten times their number of others. This evil after some years passed away, as the abolition of slavery was accepted by other countries; but the West Indies have never recovered from the shock of the double blow. Moreover, apart from these two legislative enactments, Pitts policy of ruining France by taking her colonies has resulted in the ruin of the colonies for the benefit of France. For, being deprived of all colonial produce, French men of science sought out the means of growing some of that produce in France itself; and hence arose the manufacture of sugar from the root of the beet, and an immense industry not in France only but all over Europe, which drives the best West Indian sugar out of the market. So little can even great men foresee the consequences of their actions.