that is too much to give for the power of producing an effect so beneficial."

In the above account Lewis speaks of his estate in Westmoreland: he now visits his other plantation in St. Thomas in the East, and the following brief extract describes the condition of that property :

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'Report had assured me that Hordley was the best managed estate in the island; and as far as the soil was concerned, report appeared to have said true but my trustee had also assured me that my negroes were the most contented and best disposed; and here there was a lamentable incorrectness in the account. I found them in a perfect uproar; complaints of all kinds stunned me from all quarters: all the blacks accused all the whites, and all the whites accused all the blacks; and as far as I could make out, both parties were in the right. There was no attachment to the soil to be found here. The negroes declared, one and all, that if I went away and left them to groan under the same system of oppression, without appeal or hope of redress, they would follow my carriage and establish themselves at Cornwall. I had soon discovered that although they had told me plenty of falsehoods, many of their complaints were but too well founded. Trusting to these fallacious reports of the Arcadian state of happiness at Hordley, I

supposed that I should have nothing to do but grant a few indulgences, and establish the regulations already adopted with success on Cornwall. It was, however, considerable relief to me to find, upon examination, that no act of personal illtreatment was alleged against the trustee himself, who was allowed to be sufficiently humane in his own nature, and was only complained of for allowing the negroes to be maltreated by the book-keepers and other inferior agents with absolute impunity. Being an excellent planter, he confined his attention entirely to the cultivation of the soil; and when the negroes came to complain of some cruelty committed by the book-keepers or the black governors, he refused to listen to them, and he left their complaints uninquired into, and consequently unredressed. The result was, the negroes were worse off than if he had been a cruel man himself; for his cruelty would have given them only one tyrant, whereas his indolence left them at the mercy of eight.”

Lewis proceeded to establish tranquillity on his property. He appointed a neighbouring gentleman of a humane disposition to the office of protector of the negroes: one book-keeper was dismissed for oppressive conduct, which was admitted by the trustee and stigmatised in the strongest terms; the other book-keeper ran away the next morning: the black governor was

also got rid of ;--and these sources of discontent being removed, additional holidays, allowances, and other indulgences granted, in a few days he left his negroes "with tears running down their cheeks, and all with thanks for the protection he had shown them, and earnest entreaties that he would soon come to visit them again."

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Such were the means Lewis took to improve his plantations he looked beyond the crops of this year or the next, and he accordingly improved the condition of his negroes, well assured that in so doing he was serving his own interests better than by making it his only study to exact the utmost labour, and to obtain present advantages at any sacrifice of future interests. But what is the use of referring to past times? what need to make long quotations from a work so recently published, and so easily to be procured? The utility of the reference consists in the application of the observations I have cited to the present times. The necessity of quoting these accounts is occasioned by the erroneous opinions that prevail with respect to the condition of the properties of absentees, on which every thing is supposed to be going on well so long as the returns are not suddenly diminished: and that necessity more strongly suggested itself to me, because the motives of every person who is unconnected with colonial property, who is opposed to the present system of

management, are suspected of hostility to Jamaica interests. But Lewis, a proprietor of two valuable estates, the owner of nearly 600 negroes, cannot be suspected of being desirous of injuring a country from which he derived, I believe, his only means.

Things have not changed with respect to the management of the absentees' estates, since Lewis was in Jamaica. The Abolition Bill has put an end to field-punishments, but there are innumerable vexations which that measure has left untouched; and I speak advisedly when I assert that my own experience, in parallel instances, bears out the account of Lewis in all particulars. In the parish I am now in, and I believe in all the large towns, there are few agricultural negroes; consequently, there can be no grievances of the nature of those I have alluded to. In what I have stated of the management of the country property, I am influenced by no feelings adverse to the attorneys: I have never been on other than good terms with them, and having the pleasure of being acquainted with a great number of them, I freely admit in private life they generally are as estimable gentlemen, and as honourable men, as any class of persons in any other country. It is the system I object to, and not the agents. The master who has but his own property to attend to, must surely be able to devote more attention to it

than an agent who has the management of twenty. That agent, I contend, no matter how conscientious he may be, can never feel a master's interest in the soil. The negroes cannot regard that agent, however lenient he may be to them, as they would their master. There is a natural dislike to delegated authority. The Irish peasant abhors it in the middle man; the negro labourer loves it just as little in the attorney.-I fear I have exhausted your patience; I will tax it no further than to give you the result of Lewis's experiment on the negro character, and on the condition of his estates in the last words of his journal: "What other negroes may be, I will not pretend to guess; but I am certain there cannot be more tractable or better disposed persons, take them for all in all, than my negroes of Cornwall (he had elsewhere spoken as favourably of those of Hordley). I only wish that in my future dealings with white persons, whether in Jamaica or out of it, I could but meet with half so much gratitude, affection, and good will.” I am, my dear Sir,

Yours very truly,

R. R. M.