Volume Thirteen - Pre-Victorian to the Present Day - even more aspects - Slavery - echoes of the past . . . .

From the foregoing table it will be seen that the Island of Jamaica (taken as a sample of the others) produced in former years, as compared with the present, an amount of sugar perfectly astonishing ; and I have endeavoured to trace the causes of decline . . .  If, then, we produced in the Island of Jamaica in 1808, 132,000 hogsheads [In 1802 it produced 143,000 hogsheads] and in 1846, only about 35,000, the cause of difference, surely, seems a subject of the deepest importance for careful investigation.

In the chart which I have endeavoured to give of it, the chief causes of decline appear to be emancipation of the people, and the destructive droughts to which the West Indies are occasionally subject . . . Our agricultural operations, greatly improved as they are, all go for naught when opposed to droughts on the one hand, and want of labour on the other : after a long continuance of the former, rains fall, and the Planters call for labour, but the labourer has his own little property to attend to, which has equally suffered from the same cause, possibly, and he, naturally enough, prefers to attend to his own interest, than to that of the planter!

Thus it is, and money to almost any extent, at such seasons, will not purchase his labour. The Planter's well-laid plans are frustrated, and he becomes disheartened, perhaps reckless, and sees his acres, which should have given him tons, scarcely yielding hundred weights.

Perhaps the foregoing contributes to the lack of monies available to the Rev. John Ashley to further the Mission's cause.

1790's - Anti-Saccharrites, - or - John Bull and his Family ; a caricature of the campaign to boycott slave grown sugars back in England!