I returned with a belief stronger than ever, that exclusive sugar cultivation had put a premium on unskilled slave- labour, to the disadvantage of skilled white-labour; and to the disadvantage, also, of any attempt to educate and raise the Negro, whom it was not worth while to civilise, as long as he was needed merely as an instrument exerting brute strength.

It seems to me, also, that to the exclusive cultivation of sugar is owing, more than to any other cause, that frightful decrease throughout the islands of the white population, of which most English people are, I believe, quite unaware.

Do they know, for instance, that Barbadoes could in Cromwell's time send three thousand white volunteers, and St.Kitts and Nevis a thousand, to help in the gallant conquest of Jamaica?
Do they know that in 1676 Barbadoes was reported to maintain, as against 80,000 black, 70,000 free whites; while in 1851 the island contained more than 120,000 Negroes and people of colour, as against only 15,824 whites?
That St.Kitts held, even as late as 1761, 7000 whites; but in 1826--before emancipation--only 1600?
Or that little Montserrat, which held, about 1648, 1000 white families, and had a militia of 360 effective men, held in 1787 only 1300 whites, in 1828 only 315, and in 1851 only 150?
It will be said that this ugly decrease in the white population is owing to the unfitness of the climate.

I believe it to have been produced rather by the introduction of sugar cultivation, at which the white man cannot work.

These early settlers had grants of ten acres apiece; at least in Barbadoes.