Many of the old Antislavery party found themselves deceived by this fallacy, and inclined to join the agitation against the reduction of the duty on foreign sugar. On the other hand, it was made tolerably clear that the labor was not so scarce or so dear in the colonies as had been represented, and that colonial sugar grown by free labor really suffered from no inconvenience except the fact that it was still manufactured on the most crude, old-fashioned, and uneconomical methods. Besides, the time had gone by when the majority of the English people could be convinced that a lesson on the beauty of freedom was to be conveyed to foreign sugar-growers and slave-owners by the means of a tax upon the products of their plantations. Therefore, after a long and somewhat eager struggle, the principle of free trade was allowed to prevail in regard to sugar. The duties on sugar were made equal. The growth of the sugar plantations was admitted on the same terms into that country, without any reference either to the soil from which it had sprung or to the conditions under which it was grown.
It had for a long time been stoutly proclaimed that the abolition of slavery must be the destruction of our West Indian colonies. Years had elapsed and the West Indian colonies still survived. Now the cry of alarm was taken up again, and it was prophesied that although they had got over the abolition of slavery they never could survive the equalization of the sugar duties. Jamaica certainly had fallen greatly away from her period of temporary and factitious prosperity. Jamaica was owned and managed by a class of proprietors who resembled in many ways some of the planters of the States of America farthest south—of the States toward the mouth of the Mississippi. They lived in a kind of careless luxury, mortgaging their estates as deeply as they possibly could, throwing over to the coming year the superabundant debts of the last, and only managing to keep their heads above water so long as the people of England, by favoring them with a highly protective system, enabled them still to compete against those who grew sugar on better and more economical plans. The whole island was given over to neglect and mismanagement. The emancipated negroes took but little trouble to cultivate the plots of ground they had obtained, and were quite content if they could scratch enough from the soil to enable them barely to live. Therefore Jamaica did at a certain time fall far below the level of her former seeming prosperity.
The other islands had been better managed. Their estates were less encumbered by debt, and they passed through each successive crisis without sustaining any noticeable injury. In most of these islands the product increased steadily after the emancipation of the slaves. The negroes then began to work earnestly, and education grew not greatly but distinctly among all classes. Jamaica, the most unfortunate among the islands, has been constantly the scene of little outbursts of more or less serious rebellion. As the late Lord Chief Justice of England observed in a charge on a famous occasion, "The soil of the island might seem to have been drenched in blood." But these disturbances, or insurrections, or whatever they may be called, did not increase in number after the abolition of slavery and after the equalization of the sugar duties, but, on the contrary, decreased. During our time only one considerable disturbance has taken place in Jamaica, and in former years such tumult was of frequent recurrence. In the West Indies we have, therefore, the most severe test to which the principle of free trade could well be subjected. It is not too much to say that in the more fortunate of these islands it has established its claim, and that even in the least fortunate no evidence whatever has been given that the people would have been in any way the better off if the old system had been retained.
The navigation laws had, too, a certain external attraction about them which induced many men, not actually Protectionists, to believe in their necessity. The principle of the navigation laws was to impose such restrictions of tariff and otherwise as to exclude foreign vessels from taking any considerable part in our carrying trade. The law was first enacted in Oliver Cromwell's day, at a time when the Dutch were rivals on the sea, and when it was thought desirable to repress, by protective legislation, the energy of such experienced seamen and pushing traders. The navigation law was modified by Mr. Huskisson in 1823, but only so far as to establish that which we now know so well as the principle of reciprocity. Any nation which removed restrictions from British merchant marine was favored with a similar concession. The idea also was that these navigation laws, keeping foreigners out of England's carrying trade, enabled her to maintain always a supply of sailors who could at any time be transferred from the merchant marine to the royal navy, and thus be made to assist in the defence of the country.
Of course, the ship-owners themselves upheld the navigation laws, on the plea that, if the trade were thrown open by the withdrawal of protection, their chances would be gone; that they could not contend against the foreigners upon equal terms; that their interests must suffer, and that Great Britain would in the end be a still severer sufferer, because, from the lack of encouragement given to the native traders and the sailors, England would one day or another be left at the mercy of some strong power which, with wiser regulations, would keep up her protective system and with it her naval strength.
Nevertheless, the ship-owners and the Protectionists and those who raised the alarm-cry about England's naval defences were unable to maintain their sophisms in the face of growing education and of the impulse given by the adoption of free trade. In 1849 the navigation laws were abolished. We believe there are very few ship-owners who will not now admit that the prosperity of their trade has grown immensely, in place of suffering, from the introduction of the free-trade principle in navigation as well as in com and sugar.
(1846) THE DISCOVERY OF NEPTUNE, Sir Oliver Lodge
Among modern astronomical discoveries none has been regarded as more important than that of Neptune, the outermost known planet of the solar system. It was a rich reward to the watchers of the sky when this new planet swam into their ken. This discovery was hailed by astronomers as "the most conspicuous triumph of the theory of gravitation." Long after Copernicus even, the genius of philosophers was slow to grasp the full conception of a spherical earth and its relations with the heavenly bodies as presented by him. So it was also with the final acceptance of Newton's demonstration of the universal law of gravitation (1685), whereby he showed that "the motions of the solar system were due to the action of a central force directed to the body at the centre of the system, and varying inversely with the square of the distance from it." After making this discovery, Newton himself, with the aid of others, especially of the French mathematician Picard, labored for years to verify it, and still further verification was necessary before it could be fully comprehended and accepted by the scientific world. The discovery of the asteroids or small planets revolving in orbits between those of Mars and Jupiter, aided in confirming the Newtonian theory, which the discovery of Uranus, by Sir William Herschel (1781), had done much to establish.
From the time of Sir William Herschel the science of stellar astronomy, revealing the enormous distances of the stars—none of them really fixed, but all having real or apparent motions—was rapidly developed. The discovery of stellar planets, at almost incalculable distances, still further changed the aspect of the heavens as viewed by astronomers, and when the capital discovery of Neptune was made those men of science were well prepared for studying its nature and importance. These matters, as well as the simultaneous calculation of the place of Neptune by Adams and Leverrier, and its actual discovery by Galle, are set forth by Sir Oliver Lodge in a manner as charming for simplicity as it is valuable in its summary of scientific learning.
The explanation by Newton of the observed facts of the motion of the moon, the way he accounted for precession and nutation and for the tides; the way in which Laplace explained every detail of the planetary motions—these achievements may seem to the professional astronomer equally, if not more, striking and wonderful; but of the facts to be explained in these cases the general public is necessarily more or less ignorant, and so no beauty or thoroughness of treatment appeals to it or excites its imagination. But to predict in the solitude of the study, with no weapons other than pen, ink, and paper, an unknown and enormously distant world, to calculate its orbit when as yet it had never been seen, and to be able to say to a practical astronomer, "Point your telescope in such a direction at such a time, and you will see a new planet hitherto unknown to man"—this must always appeal to the imagination with dramatic intensity, and must awaken some interest in the dullest.