The reader will have remarked, in the first extract above given, that the export of rum generally brought the planter in debt, and yet the price paid for it by the consumers appears to have been nearly a million of pounds sterling--that is, the people of England gave of labour and its products that large sum in exchange for a certain product of the labouring people of Jamaica, not a shilling of which ever reached the planter to be applied to the amelioration of the condition of his estate, or of the people upon it. The crop sold on its arrival at 3s. or 3s. 6d. a gallon, but the consumer paid for it probably 17s., which were thus divided:-- Government, representing the British people at large... 11.3 Ship-owners, wholesale and retail dealers, &c.......... 5.9 Land-owner and labourer................................ 0.0 ---- 17.2 If we look to sugar, we find a result somewhat better, but of similar character. The English consumer gave for it 80s. worth of labour, and those shillings were nearly thus divided:-- Government............................................. 27 Ship-owner, merchant, mortgagee, &c.................... 33 Land-owner and labourer................................ 20 ---- 80 The reader will now see that Mr. _Joshua Gee_ was not exaggerating when he gave it as one of the recommendations of the colonial system that the colonists left in England three-fourths of all their products,[35] the difference being swallowed up by those who made or superintended the exchanges. Such was the result desired by those who compelled the planter to depend on a distant market in which to sell all he raised, and to buy all he and his people needed to consume. The more he took out of his land the more he exhausted it and the less he obtained for its products, for large crops made large freights, large charges for storage, and enormous collections by the government, while prices fell because of the size of the crop, and thus was he ruined while all others were being enriched. Under such circumstances he could not purchase machinery for the improvement of his cultivation, and thus was he deprived of the power to render available the services of the people whom he was bound to support. Master of slaves, he was himself a slave to those by whom the labours of himself and his workmen were directed, and it would be unfair to attribute to him the extraordinary waste of life resulting necessarily from the fact that the whole people were limited to the labours of the field.