Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1848 edition. Excerpt: ... cultivated by European labourers* of industrious habits and humble views. Upwards of 2,000,000 of acres of virgin land, in the interior of the island, are admirably adapted for white immigrants, and numerous families might be comfortably settled in these beautiful districts, which otherwise must remain impenetrable forests. These cool, salubrious, elevated regions, with every variety of soil, admirably adapted for the cultivation of coffee, tobacco, cotton, indigo, figs, vines, drugs, dyes, and spices, of every production of tropical and many of temperate regions, excelling Italy in its climate and its fruits, ought long ere this to have been populated with an intelligent peasantry; and in the regeneration of Jamaica, as a free country, the introduction of an industrious and religious community from Great Britain should be an object of primary consideration. There is not within the compass of horticulture a more pleasing and delightful recreation (for work it can scarcely be called) than the daily operations of a coffee plantation, and none in which white people would be more likely to excel. Instead of the present negative system of agriculture, performed by fits and starts, so slovenly and inertly as gradually to insure destruction of property, and entail ruin on proprietors, we should then see the energy, and industry, and mind of British labourers direct every undertaking, and infuse a portion of their superior skill and ingenuity, and excite a commendable emulation among their coloured fellow-labourers, which is the paramount object of European immigration. In advocating a scheme of European immigration, it would not be advisable to recommend the indiscriminate introduction of masses of labourers to perform the ordinary agricultural...