me that it was quite out of their power to carry
out their intention. The system became for this reason a premium on
all the bad qualities of the Negroes and a tax upon all the good. In
spite of this, however, so great was the desire for freedom that
within a period of twenty-eight months, from 1st August, 1834, to 30th
November, 1836, 1,580 apprentices purchased their freedom by valuation
at a cost of L52,215 or $250,632, an average of L33 or $158.40 a head.

Although seventy-eight years have passed since the total abolition of
slavery, however, the condition of the laborers of Jamaica remains
practically the same as it was then. There has been beyond doubt much
improvement in the island, but the unfortunate fact is this, that the
laborer living in a country much improved in many respects, is himself
no better or very little better off than his forefathers in slavery.
In truth, he is still an economic slave. The conditions under which he
lives and works are such as destroy whatever ambition he may possess,
and reduce his life to a mere drudgery, to a mere animal existence.

Some progress has been made and there are signs of improvement, but
the majority of laborers, the men and women and children who till the
banana fields and work on the sugar plantations, are no better off
than previously. These are still beasts of burden, still the victims
of an economic system under which they labor not as human beings with
bodies to be fed or clothed, with minds to be cultivated and aspiring
souls to be ministered unto, but as living machines designed only to
plant so many banana suckers in an hour, or to carry so many loads of
canes in a day. After seventy-eight years in this fair island, side by
side, with the progress and improvements above referred to, there are
still hundreds and hundreds of men and women who live like savages in
unfloored huts, huddled together like beasts of the field, without
regard to health or comfort. And they live thus, not because they are
worthless or because they are wholly without ambition or desire to
live otherwise, but because they must thus continue as economic
slaves receiving still the miserable pittance of a wage of eighteen
pence or 36 cents a day that was paid to their forefathers at the dawn
of emancipation. The system is now so well established that the
employers apparently regard it as their sacred right and privilege to
exploit the laborers, and the laborers themselves have been led by