felt that equal advantages were to be secured in the West Indies, no doubt great numbers would emigrate to those islands, and thus supply the labour which is so much needed. It is, however, a singular fact, that the English, the Germans, the Scandinavians and the Chinese are the only people who freely emigrate at the present day.[1] Now it is quite impossible for Europeans to work in a sugar plantation under a tropical sun; if, therefore, the Chinese will not resort in the same way to the West Indies as they have to California and Australia, the West Indies cannot depend upon a supply of labour from voluntary emigration. Such emigration as that of the coolies cannot be regarded as voluntary. A government votes a certain sum of money to fit out ships which sail to the Malay Archipelago. The natives are canvassed to emigrate, their expenses are paid, and they are promised work when they arrive at their destination. Large numbers of coolies have in this manner been imported to the Mauritius and the West Indies, but the traffic is liable to be abused, and the coolies have occasionally endured on their voyage sufferings which seem to revive some of the horrors of the slave-trade. The coolie-traffic can never be carried on by private enterprise, because, If an individual imported coolies, he would have no power to compel them to work for him in preference to another person. If such a power were permitted, there would cease to be any real distinction between the coolie-traffic and slavery.
Other means of remedying the evil.The negroes of the West Indies are, as we before remarked, unwilling to work; and the only hope of making the people more industrious, is to stimulate in them new desires and new wants; they will not, of course, work as long as they are content to obtain little else than the food which the islands supply in abundance. If they become more anxious to have expensive clothing or expensive food, which may perhaps have to be imported from other countries, they will at once have a motive to work, and the West Indies will cease to suffer from the present great scarcity of labour. England, therefore, offers a striking contrast in every respect to- ↑ The word English is here used, as in other places in this volume, to describe the inhabitants of the United Kingdom generally.
