After this safe transition to a better state of things, the public were informed of no troubles in Jamaica for several years, except deficiency of labor, and diminished production of sugar. Pro-slavery presses, both in England and America, eagerly proclaimed these deficiencies as the results of emancipation. But enough has been already said to prove, to any candid and reflecting mind, that these effects were attributable to other causes. _First._ Emancipation found nearly all the estates on the island heavily mortgaged; most of them for more than they were worth. The compensation money, received from the British government, was soon swallowed up, the planters hardly knew how. It helped them to pay off a portion of their long-accumulating arrears, but left them still involved in pecuniary difficulties. Many of them had not money to pay for labor; and some, who had it, retained too much of the spirit of slave-holding to be scrupulous about paying the negroes for their work. Rev. Mr. Bleby says: "I know hundreds of colored laborers in Jamaica, who labored on the sugar plantations, and were defrauded of their wages. I knew a man who had a salary of one thousand pounds ($4,845) from an office under government, who employed two or three hundred laborers several months, then took the benefit of the Insolvent Act, and never paid them a cent. One of those great planting attorneys, who had fifty or sixty estates under his management, boasted to a friend of mine, that he made them profitable, by cheating the laborers out of half their wages, by one method or another. Is it surprising that the colored people should prefer to raise produce on a few acres of their own, to working on the plantations without wages? I was in Kingston when the railroad was made. It was done entirely by the colored people. The manager told me he could not desire laborers to work better. And what was the reason? Every Saturday night he paid them their wages."