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.
West India emancipation was a blunder of swindling philanthropy. People were told that the negroes, after emancipation, would work harder, work for less, and be more of slaves than before, just as had happened with emancipated English. But philanthropy "hath bad luck." It overlooked, or forgot, the few wants and indolent habits of the negro, the abundance of mountain lands, the fertile soil, the volunteer fruits and mild climate of Jamaica. The negro is really free, and luxuriates in sloth, ignorance and liberty, as none but a negro can. The mistake and the failure consisted in setting him really free, instead of nominally so. Hinc illæ lachrymæ!
What vile hypocrisy to shed crocodile tears over the happy negro, and boast of British Liberty, which is daily and hourly consuming, by poverty, and cold, and foul air and water, and downright starvation, the lives of ten millions of your white brethren and neighbors!
But this system, which carried to untimely graves three hundred thousand Irishmen in a single season, has not been condemned. No; it is profitable to the oppressors, and will not be condemned.
In all countries where a few own the property and the population is tolerably dense, laborers relieved from domestic slavery are remitted to the exploitation of skill and capital, which renders them less free and worse situated in all respects after emancipation than before. To prove this great truth, is the chief object of our present work. We know that the philosophy of the subject is intricate and complex, and that we have the prejudices, fanaticism and prepossessions of a world to oppose and conquer. We therefore indulge in frequent iteration, and adduce numerous proofs, examples and illustrations.