Page:On the motion of Sir George Strickland; for the abolition of the negro apprenticeship.djvu/22

14 the present—it was as if a man in this country should raise money by anticipation, six years beforehand, for the improvement of his estate; or as if one should obtain it by post obit bonds; and what could possibly be more inaccurate, than to mistake an artificial stimulus of this description for stable and permanent prosperity? In point of fact, we have not yet arrived at the real solution of this question, and we shall not know with any certainty, until the apprenticeship has expired, how stands the account between the state and the planter.

But I proceed to circumstances of probability which bear upon that future solution.

I find from the evidence before the committee of 1836, that the crops were only kept up at their previous amount, when the whole interest of the compensation money was laid out upon them; but I have shown that a part of that money does not properly belong to the period of apprenticeship, and therefore we have here the resources of the future forestalled, in order to meet the present necessity.

I shall next give some facts, which I take on account of their lying within my own private knowledge, and tending to show in the first place the general depreciation of West Indian property, not specially connected with the Abolition Act.

The estate of Lacovia, in Jamaica, was purchased by Mr. Watt about the year 1813. It stood in his books charged with 115,000l. The compensation