had employed the time to their best advantage, there is no doubt but they would have produced more than at present, when, in consequence of freedom, the fields have lost a third of their labourers. But I have had occasion to say, in my former reports, that forced labour has never answered the expectations that have been formed respecting it; and I find a new proof of this in the table of production in Antigua during fifteen years.” p. 196. Again, Captain Larlyle says, “If the colonists are to be believed, the plantations are worth, without the negroes, as much as they were worth formerly with their gangs of slaves.” Equally favourable is the evidence of a lady who resided in Antigua, both before and after the emancipation of the slaves, and who possessed the most ample opportunities for acquiring a knowledge of the working of either system. After referring to the depressed state of the island before the abolition of slavery, she observes: “But this oppression did not long continue; for no sooner was the deed done, and the chain which bound the negro to his fellow-man irrecoverably snapped asunder, than it was found, even by the most sceptical, that free labour was decidedly more advantageous to the planter than the old system of slavery; that, in fact, an estate could be worked for less by free labour than it could when so many slaves, including old and young, weak and strong, were obliged to be maintained by the proprietors. Indeed, the truth of this assertion was discovered even before the negroes were free; for no sooner did the planters feel that no effort of theirs could prevent emancipation from taking place, than they commenced to calculate seriously the probable result of the change, and to their surprise found, upon mature deliberation, that their expenses would be diminished, and their comforts increased, by the abolition of slavery.” Again, we are told, although there are some few persons who deny that free labour is less expensive than slavery, yet the general voice pronounces it a system beneficial to the country. It has been proved to demonstration that estates which, under the old system, were clogged with debts they never could have paid off, have, since emancipation, not only cleared themselves, but put a handsome income into the pockets of their proprietors. Land was also increased greatly in value. Sugar plantations that would scarcely find a purchaser before emancipation, will now command from £10,000 sterling; {23} while many estates that were abandoned in days of slavery, are now once more in a state of cultivation, and the sugar-cane flourishes in verdant beauty where nothing was to be seen but rank and tangled weeds, or scanty herbage.