Dr. Dickson, the editor of Mr. Steele, mentions these profits also, and in the same terms, and connects them with an eulogium on Mr. Steele, which is worthy of our attention. "Mr. Steele," says he, "saw that the Negroes, like all other human beings, were to be stimulated to permanent exertion only by a sense of their own interests in providing for their own wants and those of their offspring. He therefore tried _rewards_, which immediately roused the most indolent to exertion. His experiments ended in _regular wages_, which the industry he had excited among his whole gang enabled him to pay. Here was a natural, efficient, and profitable reciprocity of interests. His people became contented; his mind was freed from that perpetual vexation and that load of anxiety, which are inseparable from the vulgar system, and in little more than four years the annual neat clearance of his property _was more than tripled_." Again, in another part of the work, "Mr. Steele's plan may no doubt receive some improvements, which his great age obliged him to decline"--"but it is perfect, as far as it goes. _To advance above 300 field-negroes, who had never before moved without the whip, to a state nearly resembling that of contented, honest and industrious servants, and, after paying for their labour, to triple in a few years the annual neat clearance of the estate_,--these, I say, were great achievements for an aged man in an untried field of improvement, pre-occupied by inveterate vulgar prejudice. He has indeed accomplished all that was really doubtful or difficult in the undertaking, and perhaps all that is at present desirable either for owner or slave; for he has ascertained as a fact, what was before only known to the learned as a theory, and to practical men as a paradox, that _the paying of slaves for their labour does actually produce a very great profit to their owners_." I have now proved (_as far as the plan[15] of Mr. Steele is concerned_) my third proposition, or _the probability that emancipation would promote the interests of those who should adopt it_; but as I know of no other estate similarly circumstanced with that of Mr. Steele, that is, where emancipation has been tried, and where a detailed result of it has been made known, I cannot confirm it by other similar examples. I must have recourse therefore to some new species of proof. Now it is an old maxim, as old as the days of Pliny and Columella, and confirmed by Dr. Adam Smith, and all the modern writers on political economy, that _the labour of free men is cheaper than the labour of slaves_. If therefore I should be able to show that this maxim would be true, if applied to all the operations and demands of West Indian agriculture, I should be able to establish my proposition on a new ground: for it requires no great acuteness to infer, that, if it be cheaper to employ free men than slaves in the cultivation of our islands, emancipation would be a profitable undertaking there.