our return home we had a visit from Mr. C----, one of our
neighbours, an intelligent and humane man, to whose account of the
qualities and characteristics of the slaves, as he had observed and
experienced them, I listened with great interest. The Brunswick Canal was
again the subject of conversation, and again the impossibility of allowing
the negroes and Irish to work in proximity was stated, and admitted as an
indisputable fact. It strikes me with amazement to hear the hopeless doom
of incapacity for progress pronounced upon these wretched slaves, when in
my own country the very same order of language is perpetually applied to
these very Irish, here spoken of as a sort of race of demigods, by negro
comparison. And it is most true that in Ireland nothing can be more
savage, brutish, filthy, idle, and incorrigibly and hopelessly helpless
and incapable, than the Irish appear; and yet, transplanted to your
northern states, freed from the evil influences which surround them at
home, they and their children become industrious, thrifty, willing to
learn, able to improve, and forming, in the course of two generations, a
most valuable accession to your labouring population. How is it that it
never occurs to these emphatical denouncers of the whole negro race that
the Irish at home are esteemed much as they esteem their slaves, and that
the sentence pronounced against their whole country by one of the greatest
men of our age, an Irishman, was precisely, that nothing could save,
redeem, or regenerate Ireland unless, as a preparatory measure, the island
were submerged and all its inhabitants drowned off?

I have had several women at the house to-day asking for advice and help
for their sick children: they all came from No. 2, as they call it, that
is, the settlement or cluster of negro huts nearest to the main one, where
we may be said to reside. In the afternoon I went thither, and found a
great many of the little children ailing; there had been an unusual
mortality among them at this particular settlement this winter. In one
miserable hut I heard that the baby was just dead; it was one of thirteen,
many of whom had been, like itself, mercifully removed from the life of
degradation and misery to which their birth appointed them: and whether
it was the frequent repetition of similar losses, or an instinctive
consciousness that death was indeed better than life for such children as
theirs, I know not, but the father and mother, and