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by him; and he saw with his own eyes their industrious habits, their desire of property, their love of fine clothes, and their efforts to imitate the speech, manners, and dress of the creoles, and in these respects some of them had already surpassed the creoles. A great part of the laborious work of St. John's is done by them. They are fishermen, mariners, bargemen, hodien, porters, domestics. Agricultural labour had been forbidden to them by His Majesty's Order in Council respecting them. But, besides this, since their liberation, no planter likes to employ them, from a fear of their instilling into the minds of the slaves notions of liberty. Many of the women are active hucksters. Many of them, amounting to about twenty, have already purchased their own houses, including three freeholds; and only one man and five women had been thrown on the bounty of the Crown, and this by medical advice, they being declared unfit for labour.— Mr. Loving had been at pains to authenticate these facts. Apprehensions were entertained and loudly expressed by many in Antigua of the state of mendicity and wretchedness to which they would be reduced, and of the consequent burden that would fall on the public, but proved totally groundless. There may have been among the Africans persons of bad principles (it would be strange were it not so); but their general conduct has been quiet and orderly. After all, their greatest crime is what in a slave colony is termed their insolence; but those who make this charge do not consider that these Africans had not forgotten the freedom of which they had been robbed, and had sense enough to know that they could not be treated as slaves with impunity. Some of their masters and mistresses attempted so to treat them; but as the indentures strictly forbade this, and the apprentices resisted it, an incurable rankling against them has been left in the minds of the defeated party. As for any danger from the Africans there is absolutely none, though some jealousy may be entertained of them by the slaves, who see these newly-imported persons thriving as they do under the effects of their freedom. Some of them have attached themselves to the Moravians, and some to the Methodists. He did not know that education was general among them ;still they were all sufficiently enlightened to know that they ought to conduct themselves as good members of society. Hence only one case of petty larceny had occurred among them before July, 1831. They were not above the slaves generally in Antigua in respect to

religious instruction and knowledge; nor do they despise the slaves. They sometimes intermarry with them, and their social intercourse with each other is unchecked. This adds to the danger of delaying emancipation. When they intermarry with slaves, it is always before sectarian ministers. The clergy of the church are forbidden by law, under a penalty of £50, to be parties to intermarrying a free person and a slave (p. 165, 166).

The African apprentices were liberated by proclamation of the Governor. They were only required to exhibit proof that they could maintain themselves, and having done so they were all immediately made free. Their certificates of freedom were printed by Mr. Loving (p. 166).

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VI. THE REV. JOHN THORP.

The Rev. JOHN THORP was Curate of St. Thomas in the East, in Jamaica, for upwards of two years, from 1826 to 1829. He had known many emancipated slaves, but had never known or heard of any who were in want, or who lived by crime, or who hired themselves to plantation labour. They would regard it as a degradation to work with slaves, and they had also employments more profitable than field labour. There might not exist the same hindrances if slavery were abolished. The slaves in Jamaica are fed with food cultivated by themselves, with about six salt herrings a week to each adult, and half to each child, from the master. They maintain their children as well as themselves from their grounds, being allowed 26 days in the year for that purpose; but that is not enough; they work also on Sundays. The time allowed them is clearly not sufficient, as they are forced to work on Sundays also. Indeed, he remembered one instance, on an estate called Stanton, where some slaves who would not repair to their grounds on Sunday were assembled in a gang, and compelled to do so, and fed in the interim by the master. In general the slaves work in their grounds on Sunday. The surplus they raise beyond their wants they carry to market. The daily duration of field labour in Jamaica is eleven hours and a half. In St. Thomas in the East they do not usually gather grass afterwards. In crop time there is no legal limit to their night labour. The usual time of sitting up in the night was six hours. When the gangs were large this labour was lightened. In general, the slaves in crop time worked 18 hours out of 24. Their

labour, during the day, appeared to him severe and exhausting (p. 167-169).

The attendance of the slaves in his church was about 80. They were chiefly plantation slaves. They were clean in their dress; the head Negroes in white jackets and trowsers, the others in Osnaburgh, They did not wear shoes. The women generally appeared at church in a muslin dress. He had known two or three hundred emancipated slaves, and he knew them to be well behaved and industrious, not shrinking from hard labour—having a great desire for the comforts of life. He never knew them to work on sugar estates. He has known them to raise provisions, and bring them to market. He thought that the slaves, if emancipated, would be willing to work. His duties, as a curate, carried him occasionally to a few estates on which religious instruction, but only orally, was permitted by the owners. He visited 24 estates in this way, superintending some free brown catechists selected by the rector, Mr. Trew. He never visited the slaves in their houses. Reading was permitted to be taught on Sir George Rose's estates at Coley and Morant, but not during the owner's time. It was merely for half an hour during the dinner interval, twice a week, The number taught to read was only one in 38. When he went on the estates, he met the children at the boiling house, or at the house of the overseer. He knew no difference in the aptness of children to learn in Jamaica and in England: he had been much engaged in teaching the children of the peasantry in this country, both before and since his visit to Jamaica. The children were of the age of from six to fourteen. Their parents had a strong desire they should be taught. The adults did not attend on the estates, though they showed their desire for instruction by coming to the Sunday schools. The oral mode of instruction Mr. Thorp deems quite inefficient, but, when united with reading, the effect was good. He never had any conversation with the slaves respecting freedom, having been warned by Mr. Trew of the peculiar state of society in Jamaica. On the same ground he abstained from questioning overseers on the subject. He found, however, that the proceedings in this country about slavery were well known to both slave and free-they having access to the newspapers. Mr. Thorp, however, saw no symptoms of disaffection when he was there, except that he heard frequent complaints of the extent and exhaustion of labour, and of the consequent exclusion

from the means of religious instruction. Those means were at that time more abundant than in any other parish, and there was an improved moral feeling among the slaves. For, in St. Thomas in the East, not only was religious instruction to a considerable extent afforded by the rector, but the Wesleyans had three chapels largely attended by slaves (p. 170-172).

Mr. Thorp had seen the slaves cultivating their grounds and taking provisions to market, and not only supporting themselves, but their aged relations, by their own labour. He understood that the law compelled the owner to support the aged slaves; but certainly the law was not carried into effect; for, in cases he knew, they were supported wholly by the exertions of their relatives, without any thing from the owner but their small allowance of fish, and grounds which they were not able themselves to work, but which their relations assisted in working. He could not tell that the time so occupied was not made up by the masters, but his strong impression was that it was not (p. 171).

Then follows a number of questions respecting the influence of general as distinct from religious knowledge; on the nature of police regulations proper to be adopted; and on the degree in which the emancipation under such regulations would be partial or complete : they elicited, however, few or no material facts, and therefore may be passed over (p. 172, 178).

VII. THE REV. WILTSHIRE STANTON AUSTIN.

The Rev. WILTSHIRE STANTON AUSTIN is a clergyman of the established church. The insurrection in Demerara, in 1823, he conceived, arose from the ignorance in which the slaves were kept of the real purposes of government, and the excitement produced by their being led to believe that privileges had been conceded to them by the king which their masters withheld from them. Knowing, however,

*The law on this point sounds plausibly to an English ear, but in fact it goes only to prevent masters from permitting their infirm or diseased slaves to become mendicants, or to wander from the estates; and this obviously as a regulation of police, to prevent the annoyance to the public, rather than to secure a provision for the slave. See clause 17 of the Act of February 19, 1831. It does not interdict quartering them on their relatives, or prescribe the allowances to be made them.

as he did, the feelings and habits of the slaves, he did not imagine that the grant of entire freedom to them would endanger the public peace, especially if the slaves were allowed to cultivate the land from which they now draw their food. There would be no danger of either the young or the old suffering from want with their fellows around them able to give assistance; he never had seen natural affection more strongly exhibited than among the Negroes. Their wants indeed are few, and the soil is fertile; but yet such is the desire of the Negro to improve his condition, that he would make equal exertions with the European, if his inducements to labour were the same. A slave working for himself is a very different being from a slave working for his master: in the former case he labours cheerfully and willingly. On his father's estate, in Surinam, he was in the habit of employing the slaves to execute the work of the plantation by task, and he found that a reasonable day's task would thus be performed in much less time; and that when a double task was assigned to a man and his wife, the wife was sent to attend to her domestic affairs and prepare the comfortable meal, while the husband completed the task of both in the usual time allotted to labour. In Guiana and Barbadoes the slaves at present are fed by provisions raised by the gang as a common stock, which are dealt out to them by the master. If the slave were allowed to feed himself, and were paid wages for his labour, the master might be relieved from all his present heavy expenses for food, clothing, medical charges, and the cost of providing for children and for the aged and infirm, and the master would be greatly benefited by the labour of the slave. It was his father's opinion, as well as his own, that if his 250 slaves were emancipated, and he could place them around him as a peasantry, paying rent for their houses and grounds, and having also wages for all the labour they did for him, he should be a great gainer. That he could not carry this plan into effect was owing to a heavy mortgage on the estate, comprising the slaves. Had he tried to treat them as free labourers, while they were still in fact slaves, the experiment, under existing circumstances, must have failed; and if he had emancipated them the mortgagees would have interfered. He had seen in Guiana four instances of slaves emancipated and land given to them, on which they not only raised provisions, but also canes, which were manufactured into sugar at the master's mill for half the produce.