ey belonged to a race far
inferior to the Zulus and Caffres, whom I had known in South Africa.
They were more coarsely formed in limb and feature. They would have been
slaves in their own country if they had not been brought to ours, and at
the worst had lost nothing by the change. They were good-natured,
innocent, harmless, lazy perhaps, but not more lazy than is perfectly
natural when even Europeans must be roused to activity by cocktail.

In the Antilles generally, Barbadoes being the only exception, negro
families have each their cabin, their garden ground, their grazing for a
cow. They live surrounded by most of the fruits which grew in Adam's
paradise--oranges and plantains, bread-fruit, and cocoa-nuts, though not
apples. Their yams and cassava grow without effort, for the soil is
easily worked and inexhaustibly fertile. The curse is taken off from
nature, and like Adam again they are under the covenant of innocence.
Morals in the technical sense they have none, but they cannot be said to
sin, because they have no knowledge of a law, and therefore they can
commit no breach of the law. They are naked and not ashamed. They are
_married_ as they call it, but not _parsoned_. The woman prefers a
looser tie that she may be able to leave a man if he treats her
unkindly. Yet they are not licentious. I never saw an immodest look in
one their faces, and never heard of any venal profligacy. The system is
strange, but it answers. A missionary told me that a connection rarely
turns out well which begins with a legal marriage. The children scramble
up anyhow, and shift for themselves like chickens as soon as they are
able to peck. Many die in this way by eating unwholesome food, but also
many live, and those who do live grow up exactly like their parents. It
is a very peculiar state of things, not to be understood, as priest and
missionary agree, without long acquaintance. There is immorality, but an
immorality which is not demoralising. There is sin, but it is the sin of
animals, without shame, because there is no sense of doing wrong. They
eat the forbidden fruit, but it brings with it no knowledge of the
difference between good and evil. They steal, but as a tradition of the
time when they were themselves chattels, and the laws of property did
not apply to them. They are honest about money, more honest perhaps than
a good many whites. But food or articles of use they take freely, as
they were allowed to do when slaves, in pur