It had for a long time been stoutly proclaimed that the abolition of slavery must be the destruction of our West Indian colonies. Years had elapsed and the West Indian colonies still survived. Now the cry of alarm was taken up again, and it was prophesied that although they had got over the abolition of slavery they never could survive the equalization of the sugar duties. Jamaica certainly had fallen greatly away from her period of temporary and factitious prosperity. Jamaica was owned and managed by a class of proprietors who resembled in many ways some of the planters of the States of America farthest south--of the States toward the mouth of the Mississippi. They lived in a kind of careless luxury, mortgaging their estates as deeply as they possibly could, throwing over to the coming year the superabundant debts of the last, and only managing to keep their heads above water so long as the people of England, by favoring them with a highly protective system, enabled them still to compete against those who grew sugar on better and more economical plans. The whole island was given over to neglect and mismanagement. The emancipated negroes took but little trouble to cultivate the plots of ground they had obtained, and were quite content if they could scratch enough from the soil to enable them barely to live. Therefore Jamaica did at a certain time fall far below the level of her former seeming prosperity. The other islands had been better managed. Their estates were less encumbered by debt, and they passed through each successive crisis without sustaining any noticeable injury. In most of these islands the product increased steadily after the emancipation of the slaves. The negroes then began to work earnestly, and education grew not greatly but distinctly among all classes. Jamaica, the most unfortunate among the islands, has been constantly the scene of little outbursts of more or less serious rebellion. As the late Lord Chief Justice of England observed in a charge on a famous occasion, "The soil of the island might seem to have been drenched in blood." But these disturbances, or insurrections, or whatever they may be called, did not increase in number after the abolition of slavery and after the equalization of the sugar duties, but, on the contrary, decreased. During our time only one considerable disturbance has taken place in Jamaica, and in former years such tumult was of frequent recurrence. In the West Indies we have, therefore, the most severe test to which the principle of free trade could well be subjected. It is not too much to say that in the more fortunate of these islands it has established its claim, and that even in the least fortunate no evidence whatever has been given that the people would have been in any way the better off if the old system had been retained.