THE LONDON GLOBE ON WEST INDIA EMANCIPATION.
We find the following frank and explicit admission in the Globe of 10th July, 1856:
"Our own West India Islands are fast relapsing into primitive savageness. When the rich lands of Jamaica are being yearly abandoned, and when in Trinidad and Guiana cultivation has almost ceased, it is not likely that England will care to extend her sovereignty further over tropical territory, which can only be brought into use by a system which has been solemnly condemned."
Now, let us rigidly examine and ascertain what is the condemned system, what the approved system, that has been generally adopted in its stead, and why this system is approved, and the free negro system condemned as a failure.
There is no doubt the writer alludes to the system of domestic slavery, in the general, as the condemned system; and especially, to that serfdom or villienage which lately prevailed, but is now abolished throughout Western Europe. In asserting that the system of slavery has been condemned, and yet admitting West India emancipation to be a failure, he in effect maintains that the liberation of the villiens has been no failure. He means that it has been no failure, because the liberated villiens do work: aye, just twice as hard and as long as their ancestors, the serfs. He means it is no failure, because they not only work harder and longer, but work for half the pay or allowance of their servile ancestors. He means it is no failure, because the once masters, now employers, get their labor for half what it cost to support them as slaves. He means it is no failure, because free labor in England is more plentiful and far cheaper than slave labor in America. He means it is no failure, because the employers, besides getting cheaper and more abundant labor, are relieved of all the cares and anxieties of governing and providing for their laborers, in health and in sickness, in old age and in infancy. In fine, he means it is no failure, because the laborers of England are not half so free now as before their pretended emancipation. They have lost all their rights, half their liberty (for they work harder than before,) and their former masters have been relieved of all their legal obligations and responsibilities. No--British emancipation has not failed, if we look solely to the selfish interests of the property class. And British liberty, we shall show in another chapter, means the unlimited right of the property class to oppress the laboring class, uncoupled with the obligation to provide for them. But this writer well knew, that looking to the effect of emancipation on the condition of the laboring class in England, it has been a cruel and monstrous failure, from first to last. They are almost as savage and ignorant as West India negroes, know nothing of the Bible, and live in a state of continued destitution, hunger, and excessive labor, from generation to generation--from infancy to old age.