concerns of an extensive
and complicated business with distinguished ability and success. A large
portion, of not a majority of the merchants of Bridgetown are colored.
Some of the most popular instructors are colored men and ladies, and one
of these ranks high as a teacher of the ancient and modern languages.
The most efficient and enterprising mechanics of the city, are colored
and black men. There is scarcely any line of business which is not
either shared or engrossed by colored persons, if we except that of
_barber_. _The only barber in Bridgetown is a white man._

That so many of the colored people should have obtained wealth and
education is matter of astonishment, when we consider the numerous
discouragements with which they have ever been doomed to struggle. The
paths of political distinction have been barred against them by an
arbitrary denial of the right of suffrage, and consequent ineligibility
to office. Thus a large and powerful class of incitements to mental
effort, which have been operating continually upon the whites, have
never once stirred the sensibilities nor waked the ambition of the
colored community. Parents, however wealthy, had no inducement to
educate their sons for the learned professions, since no force of talent
nor extent of acquirement could hope to break down the granite walls and
iron bars which prejudice had erected round the pulpit, the bar, and the
bench. From the same cause there was very little encouragement to
acquire property, to seek education, to labor for the graces of
cultivated manners, or even to aspire to ordinary respectability, since
not even the poor favor of social intercourse with the whites, of
participating in the civilities and courtesies of every day life, was
granted them.

The crushing power of a prevailing licentiousness, has also been added
to the other discouragements of the colored people. Why should parents
labor to amass wealth enough, and much of course it required, to send
their daughters to Europe to receive their educations, if they were to
return only to become the victims of an all-whelming concubinism! It is
a fact, that in many cases young ladies, who have been sent to England
to receive education, have, after accomplishing themselves in all the
graces of womanhood, returned to the island to become the concubines of
white men. Hitherto this vice has swept over the colored community,
gathering its repeated conscriptions of beauty and innocence fro