ABSTRACT
The British Guiana civil list, it was said, had been voted on the assumption that protection against slave-grown sugar was to continue, and must now be reduced at least 25 per cent.2 Though the civil list absorbed only one-seventh of the revenue, and that had shown no signs of collapsing, the Combined Court in 1848 refused supplies on the ground of its inability to afford a civil list of the existing amount-£39,000. In the course of the year one of the ablest and most moderate of the English West India body, Henry Barkly, was appointed Governor of British Guiana; but the planters, relying on the support they were receiving in England, not only from the Protectionists and that Radical busybody Joseph H ume3 but even from q-he q-imes, stood firm. They secured the appointment in 1849 of a Select Committee of the House of Commons, but the hopes they placed in it were disappointed. Its report, whilst not unfavourable to retrenchment in future as vacancies occurred, rejected the extreme claim that the civil list arrangement should be immediately revised. Barkly was now in a much stronger position, and he was further strengthened by a better sugar crop and the better prices that prevailed in 1849: combining tact with firmness, he gradually wore down his opponents, and by the end of the year, at the cost of reductions in the general expenditure more drastic than Grey believed to be really prudent, he had gained his point as to the civil list.
