cence and fountains of redress by the poor people, who have known no
rule but the delegated tyranny of the overseer. In these expectations,
however, they very soon find themselves cruelly mistaken. Of course, if
the absentee planter has received a satisfactory income from his estate,
he is inclined to be satisfied with the manager of it, and as
subordination to the only white man among hundreds of blacks must be
maintained at any and every cost, the overseer is justified and upheld in
his whole administration. If the wretched slave ever dared to prefer a
complaint of ill-usage the most atrocious, the law which refuses the
testimony of a black against a white is not only the law of the land, but
of every man's private dealings; and lying being one of the natural
results of slavery, and a tendency to shirk compelled and unrequited
labour another, the overseer stands on excellent vantage-ground, when he
refers to these undoubted characteristics of the system, if called upon to
rebut any charge of cruelty or injustice. But pray consider for a moment
the probability of any such charge being preferred by a poor creature,
who has been for years left to the absolute disposal of this man, and who
knows very well that in a few days, or months at furthest, the master will
again depart, leaving him again for months, perhaps for years, utterly at
the mercy of the man against whom he has dared to prefer a complaint. On
the estates which I visited, the owners had been habitually absent, and
the 'attachment' of slaves to such masters as these, you will allow, can
hardly come under the denomination of a strong personal feeling.

Your authority next states that the infirm and superannuated slaves no
longer capable of ministering to their masters' luxuries, on the estate
that he visited, were ending their lives among all the comforts of home,
with kindred and friends around them, in a condition which he contrasts,
at least by implication, very favourably with the workhouse, the last
refuge provided by the social humanity of England--for the pauper labourer
when he has reached that term when 'unregarded age is in corners thrown.'
On the plantation where I lived the infirmary was a large room, the walls
of which were simply mud and lathes--the floor, the soil itself, damp with
perpetual drippings from the holes in the roof, and the open space which
served for a window was protected only by a broken shutter, which, in
order to exclude the cold