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Show 138 THE CONTRAST. be imagined, that the negroes who are not working on the estates of their old masters, are on that account, idle. Even these, are in general, busily employed in cultivating their own grounds, in various descriptions of handicraft, in limc·burning or fishingin benefiting themselves and the community, through some new, but, equally desirable medium. Besides all tl!is, stone walls are built, new houses erected, pastures cleaned, ditches dug, meadows drained, ronds made and macadarnised, stores lilted up, villages formed, and other beneficial operations effected; the whole of which, before emancipation, it would have been a folly even to attempt. 'rhe old notion that the negro is, by consti· ttttion, a lazy creature who will do no work at all except by compulsion, is now for ever exploded. Taking the s:1me population of black people, a larger proportion of them is operative under frl'edom, than was the case under slavery; and of the operative part, each individual, on an average, performs more work than he did before. 'l'hus the whole quantity of work obtained, by t\1e stimulus of wages, is considerably greater than the amount formerly procured by the tenor of the whip. When I speak of the stimulus of wages, I allude especially to its most etrective form-payment by the piece, or job. The peasantly of the county of Norfolk, in England, afford a fair specimen of industrious labor, on day's wages, in a cool climate. My own observation has led me to the conclusion that a free negro in the West Indies, paid by the day; will, in general, perform about three quarters of the quantity of work, which would be called a fair day's labor in Norfolk. But employ and pay him by the job, or piece, and he will soon equal, and even exceed, the day-labor standard of the Norfolk peasant. I presume it was chiefly to job work that a most intelligent magistrate of St. Christopher's alluded, when he said to me with gre~t emphasis-" They will do an i1ifinity of work for wages." II. An increased quantity of work thrown upon the mar, ket, is of course followed by the cheapening of labor. That this is the case in J am;:~ica, is in the clearest mrumer demonstra· THE CONTRAST. 139 ted by the experience of A. B. and his friends, in the parish of Manchester. Great is the pecuniary relief experienced by many of the planters, in the several islands which we visited, in consequence of their deliverance from the dead weight of their slaves. In many cases, the saving amounts to the half of their former outgoing. A planter who owned three hundred slaves, for whom he provided, food, clothing, bedding, household utensils, and medical attendance- not to mention white men for watchers, whips, and bilboes-is now delivered fi·om the whole of this burden ; pays one hundred free laborers instead ; and soon, by dint of job work, mechanism, ru1d short processes, reduces that number to sixty or seventy. Thus his debit in account comes to be almost as much decreased, as arc his crosses and his cares. Remember A. ll's declaration that he had rather -for the profit's sake-" make sixty tierces of co/Tee under freedom, thru1 one hundred and twenty, under slav01y." True indeed it is, that the circumstances of ditrerent estates, and even of ditrerent colonies, varied considerably as to the expenditure occasioned by the support of the slaves; and the figures, in the comparison now instituted between slavery and freedom, will vary in proportion. But so far, we have omitted to take into the account, the interest of the capital invested in slaves, and the dead loss occasioned by the excess of deaths over births-items which used to produce tremendous debits in cvety fairly arrauged balance-sheet of a West Indian slaveholder. Bring these items into view, and the saving on the side of freedom, is undoubted, uniforna, and in mru1y cases, prodigious. III. We prove the correctness of a sum in division, by a corresponding process in multiplication. Just so, do we prove the truth of the two preceding propositions, by a fact of which there is now taking place, a gradual but sure development, in all the islands which we visited ; viz : that 1·eal p1·operty has risen, and is rising, in value. In the towns, both the enhrutce· ment and improvement o{ property are extraordinary. In the country, the value of the slaves- to say the least of it- is |