Louis Rothe, the author of this report, was an important public official in the Danish West Indies, whose career in the colonial service began at the beginning of the decade of the 1840s. The decade was marked by an intensifying public debate in Denmark and her colonies on the merits of emancipation, the manner and timing of its introduction, the justice of compensation and the nature of the regimen which would succeed emancipation. As part of its preparatory briefing, the government of Denmark in 1845 commissioned Rothe, by then High Court Assessor and Judge of Probate in St.