With inexhaustible supplies of timber, the island contained, even in 1850, not a single sawmill, although it afforded an extensive market for lumber from abroad. Yielding in the greatest abundance the finest fruits, there were yet no town's-people with their little vessels to carry them to the larger markets of this country, and for want of market they rotted under the trees. "The manufacturing resources of this island," says Mr. Bigelow, "are inexhaustible;" and so have they always been, but the people have been deprived of all power to profit by them, and for want of that power there was lost annually a greater amount of labour than would have paid, five times over, for the commodities for which they were compelled to look to the distant market. Of those who did not perish, because of the necessity for an universal dependence on field employments, a large portion of the labour was then, as it now must be, utterly wasted. "For six or eight months of the year, nothing," says Mr. Bigelow, (Notes, p. 54,) "is done on the sugar or coffee plantations." "Agriculture," he continues, "as at present conducted, does not occupy more than half their time." So was it fifty years ago, and it was because of the compulsory waste of labour and consequent small amount of productive power that there existed little opportunity for accumulating capital. Population diminished because there could be no improvement of the condition of the labourer who, while thus limited in the employment of his time, was compelled to support not only himself and his master, but the agent, the commission-merchant, the ship-owner, the mortgagee, the retail trader, and the government, and this under a system that looked to taking every thing from the land and returning nothing to it. Of the amount paid in 1831 by the British people for the products of the 320,000 black labourers of this island, the home government took no less than £3,736,113 10s. 6d.,[36] or about eighteen millions of dollars, being almost sixty dollars per head, and this for merely superintending the exchanges. Had no such claim been made on the product of the labour of those poor people, the consumer would have had his sugar cheaper, and this would have made a large consumption, and these eighteen millions would have been divided between the black labourer on the one hand and the white one on the other. It would be quite safe to assert that in that year each negro, old and young, male and female, contributed five pounds--$24--to the maintenance of the British government, and this was a heavy amount of taxation to be borne by a people limited entirely to agriculture and destitute of the machinery necessary for making even that productive. If now to this heavy burden be added the commissions, freights, insurance, interest, and other charges, it will readily be seen that a system of taxation so grinding could end no otherwise than in ruin; and that such was the