een allowed to withdraw from
labor, and mothers of six children, who were exempt by the slave law
from hard labor, to come out and work in the field. All this had a
natural tendency to create irritation, and did do so; though, to the
great credit of the people, in many instances, they submitted with the
most extraordinary patience, to evils which were the more onerous,
because inflicted under the affected sanction of a law, whose advent, as
the herald of liberty, they had expected would have been attended with a
train of blessings. I effected a change in this miserable state of
things; and mutual contract for labor, in crop and out of it, were made
on twenty-five estates in my district, before, I believe, any
arrangement had been made in other parts of the island, between the
managers and the apprentices; so that from being in a more unsettled
state than others, we were soon happily in a more prosperous one, and so
continued.

No peasantry in the most favored country on the globe, can have been
more irreproachable in morals and conduct than the majority of
apprentices in that district, since the beginning of 1835. I have, month
after month, in my despatches to the governor, had to record instances
of excess of labor, compared with the quantity performed during slavery
in some kinds of work; and while I have with pleasure reported the
improving condition, habits, manners, and the industry which
characterized the labors of the peasantry, I have not been an
indifferent or uninterested witness of the improvement in the condition
of many estates, the result of the judicious application of labor, and
of the confidence in the future and sanguine expectations of the
proprietors, evinced in the enlargements of the works, and expensive and
permanent repair of the buildings on various estates, and in the high
prices given for properties and land since the apprenticeship system,
which would scarcely have commanded a purchaser, at any price, during
the existence of slavery.

I have invariably found the apprentice willing to work for an equitable
hire, and on all the sugar estates, and several of the plantations, in
the district I speak of, they worked a considerable portion of their own
time during crop, about the works, for money, or an equivalent in
herrings, sugar, etc., to so great a degree, that less than the time
allotted to them during slavery, was left for appropriation to the
cultivation of their grounds, and for marketin