Note 23 — Chapter IV · AGRICULTURAL TRIBES.

Another writer on colonial matters of the same period, Merivale, follows quite the same line of argument as Wakefield. The great demand for slaves and the great profitableness of slavery, he says, arise altogether from the scarcity of labour. “When the pressure of population induces the freeman to offer his services, as he does in all old countries, for little more than the natural minimum of wages, those services are very certain to be more productive and less expensive than those of the bondsman, whose support is a charge to the master, and who has nothing to gain by his industry.… This being the case, it is obvious that the limit of the profitable duration of slavery is attained whenever the population has become so dense that it is cheaper to employ the free labourer for hire. Towards this limit every community is approximating, however slowly.” That the relation between land and population is indeed the determining factor as regards the system of labour most suitable to a country, is clearly shown by the effect which the emancipation of the slaves had upon the economic development of the different colonies. Merivale then proceeds to divide the British slave colonies, at the time of emancipation, into three classes, as respects their economical situation. First, the oldest settlements, established in the smaller Antilles (Barbadoes, Antigua, etc.). They were those in which the land was nearly all occupied. “They were less injured than any others by the immediate effect of emancipation; for the negroes had no resource except in continuing to work; there was no unoccupied land for them to possess, no independent mode of obtaining a subsistence to which they could resort, still less of obtaining those luxuries which habit had rendered desirable to them.” “The next class is that of colonies in which the fertile or advantageously situated soil was all cultivated, and becoming exhausted; but there remained much unoccupied soil, of a less valuable description, and the population was not dense in proportion to the whole surface.” This applies especially to Jamaica. Here the colonists “were injured, perhaps, by the abolition of the slave trade; and they suffer now, since emancipation, by the difficulty of compelling the negroes to perform hired labour while they have their own provision grounds, and other resources, at their disposal.” “Finally, there is a third class of colonies, in some of which the fertility of the cultivated soil is as yet unexhausted, in others there is abundance of fertile and unoccupied land. Such are the Mauritius and Trinidad, and, in a far higher degree, Guiana”. In these colonies, after emancipation, “the negroes have found it easy to obtain a subsistence in a country overflowing with natural wealth: they have been rescued from a servitude involving, perhaps, a greater amount of labour than in any other settlements: they have abundance of land to resort to for their maintenance. The accounts, both from Guiana and Trinidad, seem to report the negroes as generally peaceful and well-inclined, but indisposed to labour, to which they can only be tempted by the most exorbitant offers of wages”23.