them with a highly protective system, enabled them still to compete against those who grew sugar on better and more economical plans.  The whole island was given over to neglect and mismanagement.  The emancipated negroes took but little trouble to cultivate the plots of ground they had obtained, and were quite content if they could scratch enough from the soil to enable them barely to live.  Therefore Jamaica did at a certain time fall far below the level of her former seeming prosperity.

The other islands had been better managed.  Their estates were less encumbered by debt, and they passed through each successive crisis without sustaining any noticeable injury.  In most of these islands the product increased steadily after the emancipation of the slaves.  The negroes then began to work earnestly, and education grew not greatly but distinctly among all classes.  Jamaica, the most unfortunate among the islands, has been constantly the scene of little outbursts of more or less serious rebellion.  As the late Lord Chief Justice of England observed in a charge on a famous occasion, “The soil of the island might seem to have been drenched in blood.”  But these disturbances, or insurrections, or whatever they may be called, did not increase in number after the abolition of slavery and after the equalization of the sugar duties, but, on the contrary, decreased.  During our time only one considerable disturbance has taken place in Jamaica, and in former years such tumult was of frequent recurrence.  In the West Indies we have, therefore, the most severe test to which the principle of free trade could well be subjected.  It is not too much to say that in the more fortunate of these islands it has established its claim, and that even in the least fortunate no evidence whatever has been given that the people would have been in any way the better off if the old system had been retained.

The navigation laws had, too, a certain external attraction about them which induced many men, not actually Protectionists, to believe in their necessity.  The principle of the navigation laws was to impose such restrictions of tariff and otherwise as to exclude foreign vessels from taking any considerable part in our carrying trade.  The law was first enacted in Oliver Cromwell’s day, at a time when the Dutch were rivals on the sea, and when it was thought desirable to repress, by protective legislation, the energy of such experienced seamen and pushing traders.  The navigation law was modified by Mr. Huskisson in 1823, but only so far as to establish that which we now know so well as the principle of reciprocity.  Any nation which removed restrictions from British merchant marine was favored with a similar concession.  The idea also was that these navigation laws, keeping foreigners out of England’s carrying trade, enabled her to maintain always a supply of sailors who could at any time be transferred from the merchant marine to the royal navy, and thus be made to assist in the defence of the country.