pecting women has done a great deal of harm. None of the women
want to work. If Lord Glenelg had made such a mistake, he would have
heard enough of it. I wish the Government would take it on themselves to
settle the rate of wages, otherwise two-thirds of the estates will be
thrown up before next year; of course I can stand this as well as any.
The ---- people have behaved well: they did every thing I told them;
they are working on piece-work, which is the best plan."

Precisely similar is the testimony of private correspondents and of the
public press so far as we have been able to learn, in all the other
colonies where emancipation has taken place. There is certainly nothing
in all this that indicates a disposition on the part of the emancipated
to throw off the employment of their former masters, but much the
reverse. We may safely challenge contradiction to the assertion, that at
the expiration of the jubilee there were not a set of free laborers on
earth from whom the West India planters could have got more work for the
same money. It may be proper in these days, when the maxims of slavery
have so fearfully overshadowed the rights of man, to say that a man has
a _right_ to forbear laboring when he can live honestly without it--or,
at all events, he has a right to choose whether he will employ himself
or be employed by another. Hence it _may_ turn out that the refusal to
labor, so far as there has been any, only serves to prove the more
clearly the fitness of the laborers of freedom.

WAGES

It must have been obvious to every man of reflection that in a change so
vast, involving so many laborers, and in circumstances so various, there
would arise almost infinite disputes about the rate of wages. The
colonies differ widely as to the real value of labor. Some have a rich,
unexhausted, and, perhaps, inexhaustible soil, and a scanty supply of
laborers. Others are more populous and less fertile. The former would of
course offer higher wages than the latter, for so sudden was the step
there could be no common understanding on the point. Again, as we have
seen, the planters came into the measure with different views. Some
anticipated the general change, and either from motives of humanity or
policy, or more probably of both, adopted a course calculated to gain
the gratitude and good will of the laborer.--These would offer wages
which the less liberal would call ruinous. Many, and it would seem the
great body of them in Ja