increased the negroes to forty thousand, most of whom were employed on the
eight hundred sugar estates.[4] For the rest of the century Barbados held
her place as the leading producer of British sugar and the most esteemed
of the British colonies; but as the decades passed the fertility of her
limited fields became depleted, and her importance gradually fell secondary
to that of the growing Jamaica.

[Footnote 2: Massachusetts Historical Society _Collections_, series 4, vol.
6, p. 536.]

[Footnote 3: G.L. Beer, _Origins of the British Colonial System_ (New York,
1908), P. 413.]

[Footnote 4: G.L. Beer, _The Old Colonial System_, part I, vol. 2, pp. 9,
10.]

The Barbadian estates were generally much smaller than those of Jamaica
came to be. The planters nevertheless not only controlled their community
wholly in their interest but long maintained a unique "planters' committee"
at London to make representations to the English government on behalf of
their class. They pleaded for the colony's freedom of trade, for example,
with no more vigor than they insisted that England should not interfere
with the Barbadian law to prohibit Quakers from admitting negroes to their
meetings. An item significant of their attitude upon race relations is
the following from the journal of the Crown's committee of trade and
plantations, Oct. 8, 1680: "The gentlemen of Barbados attend, ... who
declare that the conversion of their slaves to Christianity would not only
destroy their property but endanger the island, inasmuch as converted
negroes grow more perverse and intractable than others, and hence of less
value for labour or sale. The disproportion of blacks to white being great,