Besides Hindoo coolies, Chinese were also imported, as well as Maltese, Madeirans, and a few Germans. At first the negro thought little of this competition, but when he gradually dropped into the background, with his missionary friends, he commenced to protest against it. His friends said, and it was the truth, that there was enough labour in the colonies to carry on the estates, but the difficulty was that it could not be depended upon. Then the wages demanded by the negroes was entirely beyond the means of the planters--the price of sugar would not admit of them. It was a case of cheap labour or the alternative of giving up the struggle, and with the East Indians, British Guiana, and Trinidad recovered from the brink of ruin to become more flourishing in some respects than in the years immediately preceding emancipation. Jamaica, the greatest of the British colonies, suffered the most as she got but few immigrants, and it is only during the last decade that she has again begun to hold up her head. Without healthy competition with other races, the negroes sunk back, until they became even more degraded than those of British Guiana and Trinidad.
In Barbados, on the contrary, the population was so dense that the freedman must either work or starve. There were no waste lands and few absentee proprietors, nor were any of the estates abandoned. Labour was plentiful and cheap; it followed, therefore, that the island soon recovered from the check and went on prospering. The compulsion of the whip gave way to the force of circumstances, and the struggle for existence which ensued has made the Barbadian negro the most industrious in the West Indies. Not only is he this, but he is, like his former masters, intensely loyal to Great Britain and "Little England." All the black, coloured, and white people in the other islands call themselves Creoles, but he is "neither Crab (Carib) nor Creole, but true Barbadian born."
In the French, Danish, and Dutch colonies labour laws were enforced after emancipation, and generally with good results. They felt the change, but not to such an extent as their neighbours, and recovered all the sooner. Then they were not utterly disheartened by the unhealthy competition of slave-grown products like the English. Possibly, however, the British freedman would not have borne coercion, for even the Danes resented it.