Review_ informs us that, "In the small island of St. Lucia an Encumbered Estate Court was established in 1833, and, small as that island is,[1] in the first eighteen months, liabilities were recorded to the enormous amount of £1,089,965 ($5,280,880); _all debts incurred under slavery_. Nor did that island stand alone. In each one of them the same state of things prevailed." The laborers were decreasing rapidly. The _Edinburgh Review_ declares: "What gave the death-blow to slavery, in the minds of British statesmen, was the appalling fact that the Population Returns, from only eleven of the Colonies, showed that, in the course of twelve years, the slaves had decreased 60,219. Had similar returns been procured from the other seven Colonies, they must have shown a decrease of little, if at all, less than 100,000. Had the same rate of decrease gone on, one century would have seen the extinction of slavery by the extinction of the slaves."[2] Production was also decreasing. A table of exports, in the Appendix to Mr. Bigelow's work on Jamaica, shows that, in the ten years ending 1830, there was a decrease in that island, of 201,843 hogsheads of sugar, from the amount in the ten years ending with 1820. In view of these, and similar facts, the _Edinburgh Review_ says: "Plainly, the artificial, arbitrary interference of law with the freedom of man, and freedom of trade, was bringing about the extinction of the working-class, and was whirling their masters along to utter ruin." At the time when the planters were complaining of such excessive embarrassments, they had a monopoly of the sugar market in Great Britain, so close that not even the East India Colonies were allowed to compete with them; a monopoly, which cost the consumers $25,000,000 annually. They paid no wages to their laborers; and furnished them merely with rags to tie about their loins, and enough of coarse food to keep them in working condition. Yet while they produced from a prolific soil the great staples of commerce, without paying for the labor, and with an enormous premium from the consumers in Great Britain, they were so nearly reduced to "ruin," that they were compelled "earnestly to solicit relief from Parliament."