they arm themselves with these circumstances, they forget two things:  first, that the causes of the malady were anterior to emancipation; next, that the cure has come from emancipation itself.  Before emancipation, Jamaica was insolvent, her plantations were mortgaged beyond their value, and its planting was threatened in other ways far more than now.  Do you know what has since happened?  Difficulties which appeared insoluble have been resolved; to-day, the cape is doubled, and men navigate in peace.  At the present time, Jamaica comprises two or three hundred villages, inhabited by free negroes; the latter are willing to work; for, according to the latest information, (February, 1861,) the price of daily labor decreases instead of rising.  Among these free negroes, there are not less than ten thousand landholders, and three-eighths of the cultivated soil is in their hands.  They have established sugar-mills everywhere, imperfect, rude, yet working in a passable manner; and mills of this sort are numbered by thousands.  The middle class of color thus grows richer day by day; the families that compose it all own a horse or a mule; they have their bank-books and their accounts with the savings banks.  Lastly, which is of more value than all else, the free negroes of Jamaica have built more than two hundred chapels, and as many schools.  At the very moment when I write these lines, an enthusiastic religious movement is prevailing among them; the rum-shops are abandoned, the most degraded classes enter in their turn the path of reformation.

I should have been glad to cite our own colonies instead of confining myself to the English islands.  I have been prevented from this, not only by the memory of the conflagrations of 1859 at Martinique, and of the state of siege which it became necessary to proclaim there, but, above all, by the circumstance that the liberty of our former slaves has been too often restrained by means of the vagabond regulations, that labor has continued to be imposed on them to a certain point; that the parcelling out of property has been trammelled by fiscal measures; that, moreover, it is less the labor of our former slaves than of the Coolies and others employed, which has secured the success of our experiment; whence it follows that this success is far from being as conclusive as that which has been obtained elsewhere under the system of full liberty.  Nevertheless, our success, which is no less real, signifies something also.  If we have not yet those little free villages, that class of small negro landholders of which I just spoke, we have, like the English, free negroes in our militia and in our marine; like them, we have had our elections, and all classes of the population have taken part in them; like them, and perhaps in a greater degree, we have increased our sugar production since emancipation.  It is true that the crisis of free trade has not yet passed among us, and that we cannot know how this would be supported