continuously, and the impression was that if the duties on foreign sugar were reduced it would tend to enable those countries which still maintained the slave trade to compete at great advantage with the sugar grown in the colonies by that free labor to establish which England had but just paid so large a pecuniary fine.  Therefore the question of free trade became involved with that of free labor; at least, so it seemed to the eyes of many a man who was not inclined to support the protective principle in itself.  When it was put to him, whether he was willing to push the free-trade principle so far as to allow countries growing sugar by slave labor to drive our free-grown sugar out of the market, he was often inclined to give way before this mode of putting the question, and to imagine that there really was a collision between free trade and free labor.  Therefore a certain sentimental plea came in to aid the Protectionists in regard to the sugar duties.

Many of the old Antislavery party found themselves deceived by this fallacy, and inclined to join the agitation against the reduction of the duty on foreign sugar.  On the other hand, it was made tolerably clear that the labor was not so scarce or so dear in the colonies as had been represented, and that colonial sugar grown by free labor really suffered from no inconvenience except the fact that it was still manufactured on the most crude, old-fashioned, and uneconomical methods.  Besides, the time had gone by when the majority of the English people could be convinced that a lesson on the beauty of freedom was to be conveyed to foreign sugar-growers and slave-owners by the means of a tax upon the products of their plantations.  Therefore, after a long and somewhat eager struggle, the principle of free trade was allowed to prevail in regard to sugar.  The duties on sugar were made equal.  The growth of the sugar plantations was admitted on the same terms into that country, without any reference either to the soil from which it had sprung or to the conditions under which it was grown.

It had for a long time been stoutly proclaimed that the abolition of slavery must be the destruction of our West Indian colonies.  Years had elapsed and the West Indian colonies still survived.  Now the cry of alarm was taken up again, and it was prophesied that although they had got over the abolition of slavery they never could survive the equalization of the sugar duties.  Jamaica certainly had fallen greatly away from her period of temporary and factitious prosperity.  Jamaica was owned and managed by a class of proprietors who resembled in many ways some of the planters of the States of America farthest south—­of the States toward the mouth of the Mississippi.  They lived in a kind of careless luxury, mortgaging their estates as deeply as they possibly could, throwing over to the coming year the superabundant debts of the last, and only managing to keep their heads above water so long as the people of England, by favoring