on of his
able defence of colonial slavery. We were favorably impressed with Mr.
B.'s intelligence, and somewhat so with his present sentiments
respecting slavery. We gathered from him that he had resisted with all
his might the anti-slavery measures of the English government, and
exerted every power to prevent the introduction of the apprenticeship
system. After he saw that slavery would inevitably be abolished, he drew
up at length a plan of emancipation according to which the condition of
the slave was to be commuted into that of the old English _villein_--he
was to be made an appendage to _the soil_ instead of the "chattel
personal" of the master, the whip was to be partially abolished, a
modicum of wages was to be allowed the slave, and so on. There was to be
no fixed period when this system would terminate, but it was to fade
gradually and imperceptibly into entire freedom. He presented a copy of
his scheme to the then governor, the Earl of Mulgrave, requesting that
it might be forwarded to the home government. Mr. B. said that the
anti-slavery party in England had acted from the blind impulses of
religious fanaticism, and had precipitated to its issue a work which
required many years of silent preparation in order to its safe
accomplishment. He intimated that the management of abolition ought to
have been left with the colonists; they had been the long experienced
managers of slavery, and they were the only men qualified to superintend
its burial, and give it a decent interment.

He did not think that the apprenticeship afforded any clue to the dark
mystery of 1840. Apprenticeship was so inconsiderably different from
slavery, that it furnished no more satisfactory data for judging of the
results of entire freedom than slavery itself. Neither would he consent
to be comforted by the actual results of emancipation in Antigua.

Taking leave of Mr. Barclay, we returned to the Plantain Garden River
Valley, and called at the Golden Grove, one of the most splendid estates
in that magnificent district. This is an estate of two thousand acres;
it has five hundred apprentices and one hundred free children. The
average annual crop is six hundred hogsheads of sugar. Thomas McCornock,
Esq., the attorney of this estate, is the custos, or chief magistrate of
the parish, and colonel of the parish militia. There is no man in all
the parish of greater consequence, either in fact or in seeming
self-estimation, than Thomas McCornock