THE SUGAR QUESTION AS IT AFFECTS JAMAICA. (From "Bell's Weekly Messenger," May 8, 1852.)

New Zealander, Volume 8, Issue 669, 11 September 1852, Page 3

THE SUGAR QUESTION AS IT AFFECTS JAMAICA. (From " Bell's Weekly Messenger," May 8, 1852.)

" The effect of the reduction of duty tipon the consumption of sugar U so remarkable, that I feel it right to place it before the house. We imported in 1851, 7,200,000 cwt. of British and foreign sugar ; in 1852, 7,613,000 cwt,— being an increase of 413,000 cwt. Since the alteration in 1846, the increase of our consumption has been 1,900,000 cwt. With regard to British svgar — this is unrefined only —in 1851 we imported only 5,093,000 cwt ; in 1852, we imported 5,207,000, being an increase in that year of upwards of 114,000 cwt. During the last six years the consumption of sugar in this country has increased by 95,000 tons, being really 33 per cent, upon the consumption of the year 1846." Such was the statement made by the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the course of his financial speech on the 30th of April. As may easily be conceived, unaccompanied as this statement was by any explanation, it was I'eceived with loud applause by the advocates of free imports, one of whom tauntingly expressed a hope that the facts which had. been thus published by Mr. Disraeli had converted the Colonial Secretary (Sir J. Pakington), and that "we should hear no more of attempts to put the people on short allowance as respects sugar." Sir J. Pakington, thus challenged, let in upon the subject a measure of light, which Mr. Bright was not prepared for :—: — ''Doubtless,' 1 he said "it was the duty of government to regard with concern the interests of the colonies; but it was equally its duty to consider the great question of slavery. Although the consumption of sugar last year was very great, yet he did not think it attributable to the act of 1846. It so happened that at that period there was a great consumption of beet-root sugar in Europe. In Germany, particularly, if had increased to a great extent. One consequence was, that slave-groion sugar was prohibited in those countries, and the English market was nlckssakily inundated with it (hear, hear). He doubted very much, looking to the general bearing of the question, whether the great increase of consumption spoken of by his right lion, friend ought to be regarded as matter of congratulation. The figures given by his right hon. friend went, indeed, to show that the importation of British sugar had not fallen off. His statement was, that in 1852 the importation of British-grown sugar was 5,207,562 cwt., and in 1851 the importation was 5,092,324 cwt., making an increase of 1 14, 238 cwt. But his right hon. friend at the same time showed that the total importation of sugar in 1852 was 7,G13,144 cwt., and in 1851 it was 7,200,159 cwt., making an increase for 1852 of 412,985 cwt. Deducting the 114,238 cwt. from the gross increased importation of 412,985 cwt., left a balance of 298,747 cwt. as the increased importation of slave-grown sugar in the year 1852. With respect to the price of sugar, that of British-grown sugar had fallen considerably, but the price of foreign-grown sugar had fallen a great deal more. His right hon. frie-id had not touched upon this fact at all, but it was one which had involved our sugar colonies in prolonged distress. He had now in his possession petitions from Jamaica and from British Guiana telling a tale of sorrow and distre&s." We invite our readers to ponder the facts by which Sir J. Pakington, who fully understands the subject on which he spoke, qualified the statements of his collengue. Again and again have we vyarned our legislators and the country, of the inevitably ruinous consequences to Jamaica, and our other sugar-growing colonies, through the passing of the bill of 1846— an act which the slave-owners in Cuba celebiated by a public illumination in Ilavanna ! We have now before us documents corroborating to the very letter our prognostications, and demonstrating beyond the possibility of doubt, that if

prompt and energetic steps be not taken to arrest the ruin which is rapidly overspreading Jamaica, that beautiful island, which, treated with simple justice, as a part of the magnificent empire of Great Britain; would become a source of untold material wealth and moral influence, is doomed to be thrown back into the state of luxurious wildness which it presented before the foot of the European trod its soil, and its negro population become once more the piey of the most degrading superstions and the most debasing vices. Are we led away by excited feelings? Are we colouring thepicture too highly ? We are speaking the words of soberness, and, as we believe, of truth, when we assert, in the words of one resident in Jamaica, " that the time is now near, unless Parliament interferes, when slavery will reap a glorious harvest, and the emancipated British slave become a beggar and a savage." But as one well authenticated fact is worth a thousand opinions, and as the value of opinions is to be measured by the data on which they are based, we proceed to lay before our readeis a i'ew passages from a document which we have just received, being " An Appeal of the Black and Coloured Inhabitants of St. Elizabeth, in Jamaica, to the upright and generous people of England :—: — " People of England,— You made us free, and we bless you for the boon ; you raised us to that position which is the proud birthright of every one, however humble, that is born on British "round, and that, too, at great national cost and individual sacrifice — and ever while we live shall that noble and rightcons act live and be cherished in our breasts, and its memory shall be bequeathed as a holy treasure to our children. But we now tell you that danger is at hand : that our progressive improvement and civilization is in peril ; that while endowed with civil and political liberty, j a bondage worse than that from which we have been* redeemed, even the bondage of ignorance immorality and irreligion, is already hastening to undo your glorious work, and to consign us and our offspring to hopeless and irretrievable barbarism ; that the grand lesson England once taught the world is being counteracted by the tendencies of her own policy, that the bright example she once set to all the nations of the earth is being practically defeated and obscured by the sad, though certain encouragement, her late measures have imparted to the inhuman traffic in the bone and sinew of suffering humanity. " People of England, — This is no exaggerated statement of the results of that, to us at least, fatal measure, vainly denominated Free-trade, as manifested in the now prostrate condition of this once flourishing land. We were promised Protection when we were made freemen, and so long as we were pi otected, so long we prospered ; at least we murmured not. It is not, that we are opposed to the principle of an honest Free-trade, provided that principle be fairly defined and fully carried out ; but thai ' trade' surely is unworthy the name of ' free 1 that benifits "the alien, by holding out a premium for the prolongation of slavery, and a continuance of the horrors of the slave-trade, u hile it coldy consigns to ruin, not only your own colour, your own flesh and blood, but us also, your near-born brethren, whose interests are indissolubly connected with those of the proprietors of the soil. It is not that we fear com petition with the free : it is not that we shrink from thefair field where there is no favour, but we cannot enter the lists with the slave, we cannot compete with ph otected slavery. If we are to have Free-trade, let it be a Free-trade with a free peoi'le, and then, if we fail, you may, if you will, charge us with that indolence and apathy and want of tact which so frequently has been attributed to the Creole race. " Our condition is now deplorable in the extreme — indeed, it is hardly possible to exaggerate its extremity. The abandonment of the sugar estates, consequent upon the ruinous competition into which we have been forced by the bill of 18 16, has, as an inevitable result caused the withdrawal of a great, if not the greater portion of the money, that by their cultivation was once circulated amongst us ; and how deeply, how materially, even the partial abandonment has affected the interest of the community, tax gatherers and collecting constables best can testify. True, they can levy once upon our little possessions ; they can take our horses, our mules, our cattle, our hoes, our tables, our beds — but such a system of taxation must very shortly destroy itself . " People of England — You are an honourable and upright raee — you are more than that — you are a kind and compassionate people ; your shores are never closed against the exile and the wanderer — your hearts are never steeled against the tale of suffering and sorrow — you have ever been the sworn foes of oppression and wrong — ever the sworn friends of justice and good faith ; the banished alien ever has found a home with you, the outcast from his own kindred has never yet on English ground failed to obtain a welcome. All we ask of you is this — do not deal less kindly by us than you have done by them — do not refuse your fellow subjects that sympathy and assistance which you have so often ex -ended to the alien. Do not let it be said that England freed the slave, and then neglected the freeman — that she enrolled a multitude of grateful bondsmen among the ranks of her own citizens, and then denied them the common rights of Englishmen. You do not wish us to go backward instead of forward — you do not wish to_see us retrograde instead of advance in education, morality, and religion — you do not wish to see our institutions abandoned, our schools closed, our hospitals unprovided, our clergy banished or begging their bread — you do not, you cannot so covet cheap svgar — you are not, you cannot so be wedded to a political theory, as" for its sake to bereave thousands of your fellow-sub-jects and countrymen of all the means and appliances of civil and religious improvement, and i ivet on the necks of a suffering race the iron of hopeless slavery, while foreign nations exult in English inconsistency, and fatten on the ruin of your forsaken colonies. * * * * " People of England,— We entreat you to listen to us. Do not iinag me we are overstating our danger ; do not conceive that that danger is only casting the premonitory shadow of its future advent. Believe us, it is at hand in all the sad reality of substance. Another year of the present condition of things, and cultivation must be abandoned, exportation cease, and imports soon be withdrawn from our shores ; one common ruin will alike invole the planter, the labourer, the penkeeper, and the merchant ; and commerce and agriculture, civilization and religion, willbe buried in the wreck of our social system. " But surely you will not leave us to our fate — you will not suffer our blessing to be corrupted into a curse — you will not behold us falling into a gulf of ignorance and vice, without stretching out a hand to saye — neither will you withhold your assistance until it be too late to arrest the rapid progress of our desolation. But you will now, though in the eleventh hour, investigate our actual conditon; you will examine the truth of our statements, and test the reality of our di tress ; and convinced that your present policy, as bearing respectively on the freeman and the slave, is fraught with the ruin of your West India colonies, and the subveision of the effects of the great emancipation victory ; and acknowledging that cheap sugar (if indeed Free-trade be really necesrary to its cheapness^ is dearly purchased at the sacrifice of British subjects, and the increased sufferings of the hapless slave, you will throw open your markets to the products of freedom, you will restore hope and confidence throughout the circle of our isle, and cause the pulse of agriculture and commercial enterprise once again to beat as in days of yore; so that civilization will progress, education will advance, industry will be fostered, and the blessings o f true religio"n be more widely diffused,- and then it may be— and, people of England, you too will join in our rejoicing — it may be that brighter days will yet dawn upon Jamaica, that our banished prosperity will rewsit

our shores, the re-cultivated earth once more will yield her increase, while God, even our own God, will give us His blessing." Wo will not add a word to this eloquent and touching appeal, for to do i-o woull be to weaken its force"; but we may express a hope, that even Mr. Disraeli, when he becomes acquainted with the facts of the case — not,as seen through an increased importation of a few thousand hogsheads of sugar, the result of an extraordinarily fine season but as exhibited in the rapid and continuous abandonment of estates, -and the appalling increase of poverty, ignorance, and vice, — will _be willing to acknowledge, that the temporary increase of the comforts of those of the labouring classes of this ki no-do m who can obtain sugar may be purchased at {Tcost from which humanity recoils with horror, and from any participation in which the poorest ofom poor, instructed in the truth, would wash his hands, lest the blood of his brother should be required of him.