we reply that though such labour be in general light, the superintendants of their work cannot be qualified to judge of their situation; while unluckily the artifices and efforts of the women to elude work of any kind, may lead to indiscriminate urgency on the part of the overseers.

Several facts concur to support this view of the question. On two estates situated in the same district and belonging to the same proprietor, the one a coffee, the other a sugar-plantation, the negroes increase in number on the former, while on the other they are stationary. In both they are exempt from night-work and the fatigue of heavy burthens; so that the cause of the difference is, doubtless, to be sought in the nature of their employment, in the lighter labour of the coffee-estate. As to rearing children, mothers employed in domestic service commonly succeed better than those who work out of doors; and those resident on penns or cattle-estates better than those on sugar plantations. With regard to medical attendance, almost every plantation has an hospital, and a surgeon under an engagement to visit the patients regularly. This attendance is generally considered by planters, superior to what is received by the labouring classes in this country, an opinion, however, in which we can hardly concur. Of the practitioners in our colonies, a number are necessarily young and inexperienced; the charge of an estate may be conferred by an agent from favour without sufficient consideration of the capacity of the individual; and the distances to be traversed being occasionally great, it was not unusual for several days to intervene between visits, until of late the number of medical men has increased.

Should these different causes appear insufficient to account for the non-increase of our negro population, we can only add the general caution, that our estimates for the West Indies ought not to be formed on the unprecedented increase of numbers in this country in the present age. We ought rather to refer to a century back, when, in consequence of various causes, of which the principal probably were a general ignorance and indolence in our lower orders, similar to what prevails at present among negroes, male and female, the augmentation of our numbers proceeded far less rapidly than at present.

Complaints of severity are at all times calculated to make an impression on the public; and our great objection to the abolitionists is that they are apt to direct their arguments to our sympathy instead of our conviction. Examples of severity in the treatment of negroes may, doubtless, be occasionally found among our colonists; but the question is, first, whether such examples are frequent; and next, whether the extent of suffering among the ne

groes is greater or less than among our own peasantry. How easy would it be to work on the feelings of the public by a description of the state of Ireland-by a contrast between the poverty of the cottagers and the wasteful hospitality of the higher ranks! A similar course might be followed in regard to the chief part of Scotland, of France, in short, of almost every country in Europe: for England and Holland alone are pre-eminent in their charities. In the case of the Africans, unaccustomed to labour and unacquainted with our language, compulsion was unavoidable, and was, doubtless, at times accompanied by undue severity. Habituated in their own country to a state of barbarism, they could be acted on only by corporal punishment, and would have been inca pable of comprehending laws passed in their favour by the colo→ nial legislatures. It was about half a century ago (say the Com→ mittee of Assembly in Jamaica in their Report in December, 1815) that the treatment of our negroes began to receive a visible amelioration; the import of raw recruits was checked by the war, and, on the separation of the North American colonies from the mother-country, a number of suffering loyalists removed to our sugar islands, bringing with them negroes of a more intelligent character than those in the West Indies. A milder system of treatment was thus gradually introduced, and new regulations became expedient; the punishment of death was decreed to every white person who should wantonly deprive a negro of life, and many of the severities formerly permitted were abolished by the consolidated slave-law passed in Jamaica in 1784. No slave can now be punished by iron collars, weights or chains; while in each parish there is established a council for protecting negroes and calling to account whoever shall presume to oppress them.

The negroes employed on estates may be divided into several classes, at the head of which we shall place those who perform their work regularly and without compulsion. To this class, happily the most numerous, the infliction of the whip or severe punishment of any kind is, in a manner, unknown, whether they be employed as house-servants, as mechanics, or as field-labourers. The next class consists of those who go through their work with tolerable fidelity during the stated hours of labour, but who, too improvident to work for themselves on holidays, trust to chance, occasionally perhaps to theft, for the supply of such wants as are not provided for from their master's store. Negroes of this class frequently pass their holiday in working for their more careful brethren, receiving a small allowance for the wants of the moment, instead of cultivating and turning to account their own little lots of ground. The last class consists of those who work neither for themselves

themselves nor their masters; but who skulk in the vicinity of the estate, and subsist by depredations on the property of their owner, of his neighbours, or of their fellow slaves. This class, at present very limited, is happily in a course of progressive reduction.

It is natural, after this statement, to ask, why, if the great majority of negroes are well disposed, the planters so strongly object to the disuse of the whip, or rather to the removal from view of an instrument which is now not often employed? Because, it is answered, almost every attempt hitherto made to dispense with the whip, (and such attempts have been numerous,) has had an unpleasant result, relaxing the good behaviour of the negroes, and necessitating the application of punishment to those who would not otherwise have required it. The negroes in the West Indies, like all men whose wants are supplied to their hands, are to the last degree thoughtless and improvident, affording, in short, a striking exemplification of what the French term de grands enfans. Thus those who, while working under superintendance, will pass day after day and week after week, without any idea of evading their share of labour, are no sooner trusted to themselves, and sent to perform a task that requires attention during three or four days, than they are found to absent themselves before the expiration of the time, or to fail, in some other manner, in the discharge of their duty. Often,' says an experienced planter, have I, before ordering chastisement for such a trespass, asked the delinquents, Why have you forced me to this severity; why not enable me to treat you with continued kindness?" and as often have I heard them reply, "We cannot blame our master or the overseer, for we have brought this trouble on ourselves."

. I have long wished,' writes another Jamaica planter,' that the whip should not be taken into the field, but that punishment, when necessary, should be inflicted at home and after due deliberation. To discontinue corporal punishment entirely would, under present circumstances, be impracticable: in Europe the peasantry have the strongest impulses to labour; the dread of want for themselves, and their children. In our colonies neither feeling operates; the negroes being aware that, in any event, their masters will not venture to neglect the health of them or their children.'

It follows from all this that, though the use of the whip, as a stimulus to labour, may be immediately prohibited, the public in England must be prepared for some delay in its total abandonment as an instrument of discipline; satisfying themselves in the mean time with the adoption of proper regulations to prevent the abuse of it, and with the reflection, that the punishment inflicted on negroes is far less severe than that of our soldiers and sailors.

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The charge of harsh treatment is far from being confirmed by the looks and demeanour of the negroes. Instead of standing, as might be inferred from the language of some writers, in great awe of their masters, or being rendered heavy or spiritless by their situation, care sits lightly on their mind, and they are, in fact, very talkative and familiar with their superiors. That this is the case of both men and women employed in domestic service, must be apparent to all who have any means of observation; and nothing is more usual (Sir Henry Martin's Counter-Appeal, p. 17) than for negroes who have left their master and made their way to England, to make application to be sent back to the West Indies to resume their servitude. In regard to plantation negroes, it is evidently the interest of the owner and manager of an estate to consult their comfort, and to prevent those who oversee them from exercising undue severity. But the owner, it may be said, is, in general, absent, and his representatives are less interested in the care of his negroes. To this it may be added that, until the evidence of negroes shall be admitted in courts of justice, it can not be expected that the laws in their favour will receive their full execution. Most desirable certainly would it be, that the different colonies should consent to receive the evidence of slaves under modifications and limitations, if such should appear necessary, both as to the qualification of the individual, and the nature of the case in question; for, until that takes place, the abolitionists and, we may add, the great majority of our countrymen (having no local knowledge of the West Indies) will be slow in believing that substantial justice is rendered to the negroes, whatever may be the impartiality of the colonial magistrates, or the disrepute to which harsh conduct would subject a planter among his brethren.

The readers of those speeches and pamphlets which represent the negroes in our colonies as doomed to lasting penury, will be not a little surprized on discovering how frequently acquisitions of property are found to take place among them. Marketing may be turned to account by them during six or seven months in the year; while in a country so unsuited to Europeans, and consequently devoid of active competitors, the prices of articles are much higher than in Europe. The bundle of grass which a negro carries to town on his head is often sold for half-a-dollar; but his chief profit is on the sale of provisions, the raising of which requires no great labour, little more, in short, than care and attention. As to the aid afforded them in their concerns, whatever may be the faults of our planters, parsimony is seldom of the number, and great latitude is given to negroes in regard to ground for culti vating their vegetables, or feeding their pigs and poultry. To form an estimate of the acquisitions of the more affluent among them VOL. XXIX. NO. LVIII. would

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would be no easy matter, in the absence of saving banks and other records of the property of the lower orders; several instances, however, not a little gratifying, have come to our knowledge, such as a negro bequeathing £100 in money, distinct from other property; and a planter, when pressed to make a payment, finding a loan without difficulty among his own negroes. Nor are these cases so rare as may be thought; they are to be found in a variety of quarters, and in colonies exhibiting very different degrees of cultivation; in Antigua, which is one of our oldest possessions; in Trinidad, which is comparatively recent; and in Jamaica, which, from the early date of its settlement on the one hand, and the extent of uncultivated ground on the other, partakes of the character of both.

Having now exhibited somewhat in detail the condition of the negroes, we shall, by way of summary, insert an extract from a Report made last year by a committee of the assembly of Tobago, a colony which has been one of the most active in the introduction of late improvements..

Your Committee refer to the public documents of the colony, to shew how the annual reduction in numbers is now so much less than it used to be, that we may confidently hope, that, instead of an annuał reduction, we shall speedily obtain an annual increase. From the diffusion and increase of property among the negroes (generally evinced in their houses, their grounds, their dress, and their food), the diminished practice of obeah, the unfrequency of punishment, and the total relinquishment of night-work upon the estates, your committee believe that as much gradual improvement has been made, as the nature of our black population (a great portion of it yet consisting of imported Africans) admits of. Other matters of amelioration of the condition of the negroes are in gradual advancement upon many of the estates and will become general.'

Such is the language of the assembly of Tobago, and without desiring our readers to receive this as a representation of the state of things in every British colony, we have no hesitation in claiming their assent to the general conclusion that there has been, during many years, a progressive improvement in the condition of the negroes, and that, as far as regards the question of humane treatment, their situation is very different from the representations of the abolitionists. We cannot therefore join in their appeal to the public on this ground: to another of their objects, an eventual change in the payment of labour in the West Indies, we are, as we shall show presently, favourably disposed; but it is incumbent on us, in the first instance, to explain the difficulties with which it is attended.

The more cautious investigators of the slave system have fixed