Note 103 — CONCLUSION.
Reading edition
This paper is published at Kingston, Jamaica, and in confirmation of the views of the London Economist, quoted in the body of the work, the following extract is copied from its columns:
"Barbadoes, we all know, is prosperous because she possesses a native population almost as dense as that of China, with a very limited extent of superficial soil. In Barbadoes, therefore, population presses on the means of subsistence, in the same way, if not to the same extent, as in England, and the people are industrious from necessity. Trinidad and British Guiana, on the other hand, have taken steps to produce this pressure artificially, by large importations of foreign labor. The former colony, by the importation of eleven thousand coolies, has trebled her crops since 1854, while the latter has doubled hers by the introduction of twenty-three thousand immigrants.
"While Jamaica is the single instance of retrogression, she affords also the solitary example of non-immigration.
"Mauritius, by importing something like one hundred and seventy thousand laborers, has increased her exports of sugar from 70,000,000 lbs. in 1844, to 250,000,000 lbs. in 1858. Jamaica, by depending wholly on native labor, has fallen from an export of 69,000 hhds. in 1848, to one of 28,000 hhds. in 1859.
"It is believed that there are not at this moment above twenty thousand laborers who employ themselves in sugar cultivation for wages."