ity 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 Jamaica, yielded unwillingly to superior power.
They saw the sceptre of despotic authority was to be wrested from their
grasp. They threw it down, as one may easily believe, resolved to seize
the best substitute they could. They would infallibly fall upon the plan
of getting the greatest possible amount of work for the least possible
amount of pay. When we consider that even in the oldest, most civilized,
and most Christianized free-labor communities, employers are wont to
combine to keep down the rate of wages, while on the other hand the
laborers throw up work to raise it, we shall not be surprised that there
should be things of this sort in Jamaica, liberty being in the gristle.
The only help for such an evil is, that there is always a rate of wages
which is advantageous to both parties, and things being left to
themselves, it will at last be found.

To the planters and freed-men in settling the question what wages they
should offer and receive, two standards or guides presented
themselves,--1. The rate of wages which had been given in Antigua since
1834. 2. The compensation that had been demanded by the Jamaica planters
themselves, and adjudged by the magistrates, in case of apprentices
buying their own time. Hundreds of planters had declared upon oath what
the time of the apprentice was worth to them. Possibly as sellers, in
the elasticity of their consciences, they may have set a higher price
than they would be willing to give as buyers. In strict honesty,
however, it is difficult to see why labor should not be worth to them as
much in the one case as the other. The rate of wages fixed upon in
Antigua may be seen by a reference to the Journal of Thome and Kimball
to be very inadequate to the wants of the laborer. Free labor is there
screwed down to the lowest possible point. The wonder is that the
laborers should have submitted to such a scale for a moment. But they
had no precedent to guide them, no advisers free from the yoke of the
proprietary, no valuations given by their own masters, and there was
every facility for successful combination on the part of the masters.
They must work for such wages as the masters pleased to offer,
or starve.

Say Messrs. Thome and Kimball--"_