Widely different would have been the state of affairs had they been permitted to make their exchanges at home, giving the cotton and the sugar for the cloth and the iron produced by the labour and from the soil of the island. The producer of the sugar would then have had all the cloth given for it by the consumer, instead of obtaining one-fourth of it, and then the land would have increased in value, the planter would have grown rich, and the labourer would have become free, by virtue of a great natural law which provides that the more rapid the augmentation of wealth, the greater must be the demand for labour, the greater must be the _quantity_ of commodities produced by the labourer, the larger must be his _proportion_ of the product, and the greater must be the tendency toward his becoming a free man and himself a capitalist.[38] As a consideration for abstaining from converting their own sugar and cotton into cloth, it had been provided that their products should enjoy certain advantages in the ports of the mother country; and the understanding at the date of emancipation was that the free negro should continue in the enjoyment of the same privileges that had been allowed to the slave and his master. It was soon, however, discovered that the negro, having scarcely any desire beyond the food that could be obtained from a little patch of land, would not work, and that, consequently, the supply of sugar was reduced, with a large increase of price, and that thus the ship-owner suffered because of diminished freights, the merchant because of reduced consumption, and the government because of reduced revenue. Instead of obtaining, as before, one-fourth of the product, the cultivator had now perhaps one-half, because the taxes did not rise with the rise of price. Nevertheless, the land-owners and labourers of the island were weaker than before, for all power of association had disappeared; and now it was that the trader and the government discovered that if they would continue to draw from the sugar producers of the world their usual supplies of public and private revenue, they must resort again to slave labour, putting the poor free negro of Jamaica, with his exhausted soil, on the same footing with the slave of Brazil and Cuba, on a virgin soil; and this, too, at a moment when the science of Europe had triumphed over the difficulty of making sugar cheaply from the beet-root, and Germany, France, and Belgium were threatening to furnish supplies so abundant as almost to exclude the produce of the cane. They, too, had the sugar-refinery close at hand, whereas the poor free negro was not permitted to refine his product, _nor is he so even now_, although it is claimed that sugar might still be grown with advantage, were he permitted to exercise even that small amount of control over his labour and its products. What was the character of the machinery with which they were to enter on this competition will be seen by the following extract:--