uestion is, What is the ability of the negro to bear
these burdens? A defender of the planters gravely asserts "that the
negro demands a price for his labor which would be exorbitant in any
part of the world." What is that exorbitant price? An able-bodied
agricultural laborer in Jamaica receives from eighteen to thirty cents a
day; and, if he is both fortunate and industrious, may net for a year's
work the fabulous sum of from fifty to eighty dollars. And this in a
country which is one of the dearest in the world; where the necessaries
of life are always at war prices; where flour is now twenty dollars a
barrel, and eggs are fifty cents a dozen, and butter is forty cents a
pound, and ham twenty-five, and beef and mutton still higher.

Did the laborer actually receive his pittance, his lot might be more
tolerable. But it is the almost universal complaint, that, either from
inability or disinclination, the planter does not keep his agreements.
Sometimes the overseer, when the work has been done, and well done,
arbitrarily retains a quarter, or even a half, of the stipulated wages.
The negro says he has no chance for redress; that even a written
agreement is worth no more than a blank paper, for the magistrates are
either all planters, or their dependents, and have no ears to hear the
cry of the lowly. Add now to all this the fact, that the last few
seasons have been unfavorable to agriculture; that planters and peasants
alike are even more than usually poor; that in whole districts the
blacks are destitute, their children up to the age of ten or twelve
years from absolute necessity going about stark naked, and their men and
women wearing only rags and streamers, which do not preserve even the
show of decency;--and is there not sufficient reason, not indeed to
justify murder and arson, but why a whole race of suffering and
excitable people should not be stamped as fiends in human shape for the
outrages of a few of their number?

* * * * *

Turn now to the actual scene of conflict. In a little triangular tract
of country on the east shore of Jamaica, hemmed in between the sea and
the Blue Mountains, twenty-five miles long and two thirds as wide,
occurred in October last what Governor Eyre has seen fit to dignify with
the name of an insurrection. The first act of violence was committed at
Morant Bay,--a town where it is said that no missionary to the blacks
has been permitted to live for thir