extent; but I am also inclined to think that another cause of mortality might be found in the mode and manner in which the negro was fed and clothed, and not because aged persons were exclusively engaged in the manufacture.  I believe I may state, without fear of contradiction, that the real cause of the decline and consequent abandonment of the indigo plant was the monstrous duty levied upon it by the English government.  Indeed, this has been already stated in the extract from Bridges; while the cause of the failure of the attempt to renew it, over and above the reasons we have given, was the greater temptation to embark capital in sugar plantations,—­the West Indies enjoying a monopoly in this article, while they had competitors in the Southern States of America in the other.  I have, therefore, no hesitation in saying, that, with a trifling capital, under prudent management, indigo might be cultivated to a very great extent, and with considerable profit, even now, in Jamaica.  But the adventurer is not to expect to count his gains, as the original growers did, by thousands; he must be content with hundreds, if not fifties; for at the present day every branch of industry is laden with difficulties, encumbered by taxation, and obstructed by competition.  There are two objections, however, which I have not removed,—­I allude to “the failure of the seasons and the ravages of the worm.”  Very little need be said to combat these.  Seasons are mutable, and the same heaven that frowns this year on the labors of the husbandman, may smile the next; while a remedy for the “ravages of the worm” may be found in the mutation of the soil, the destruction of the grub, or the rotation of crops,—­accessories to success which seem not to have entered into the vocabularies of the twenty pseudo indigo-growers, “many of them men of knowledge, foresight and property.”

The following passage from Bryan Edwards will corroborate much that I have endeavored to enforce.  It furnishes not only a solution which has been hinted at before, of the enigma why indigo ceased to be cultivated in Jamaica, but also an incentive to re-introduce the culture.  He says (p. 444), “It is a remarkable and well-known circumstance, after the cultivation of indigo was suppressed by an exorbitant duty of near L20 the hundred-weight, Great Britain was compelled to pay her rivals and enemies L200,000 annually for this commodity, so essential to a great variety of her most important manufactures.  At length, the duty being repealed, and a bounty some time after substituted in its place, the States of Georgia and South Carolina entered upon, and succeeding in the culture of this valuable plant, supplied at a far cheaper rate than the French and Spaniards (receiving too our manufactures in payment) not only the British consumption, but also enabled Great Britain to export a surplus at an advanced price to foreign markets.”—­It is therefore plain that the manufacture of indigo was lost to