for though some of these are described as being only a stone’s throw from their huts, others are described as being one, and two, and three, and even four miles off; and let us take into the account also, that Sunday is, by the confession of all, the Negro market day, on which alone they can dispose of their own produce, and that the market itself may be from one to ten or fifteen miles from their homes, and that they who go there cannot be working in their gardens at the same time, and we shall find that there cannot be on an average more than a clear three quarters of a day in the week, which they can call their own, and in which they can work for themselves.  But call it a whole day, if you please, and you will find that the slave does for himself in this one day more than a third of what he does for his master in six, or that he works more than three times harder when he works for himself than when he works for his master.

I have now shown, first by the evidence of Mr. Botham, and secondly by the fact of Negroes earning more in a given time when they work in their own gardens, than when they work in their master’s service, that the old maxim “of its being cheaper to employ free men than slaves,” is true, when applied to the operations and demands of West Indian agriculture.  But if it be cheaper to employ free men than slaves in the West Indies, then they, who should emancipate their Negroes there, would promote their interest by so doing.  “But hold!” says an objector, “we allow that their successors would be benefited, but not the emancipators themselves.  These would have a great sacrifice to make.  Their slaves are worth so much money at this moment; but they would lose all this value, if they were to set them free.”  I reply, and indeed I have all along affirmed, that it is not proposed to emancipate the slaves at once, but to prepare them for emancipation in a course of years.  Mr. Steele did not make his slaves entirely free.  They were copyhold-bond slaves.  They were still his freehold property:  and they would, if he had lived, have continued so for many years.  They therefore, who should emancipate, would lose nothing of the value of their slaves, so long as they brought them only to the door of liberty, but did not allow them to pass through it.  But suppose they were to allow them to pass through it and thus admit them to freedom, they would lose nothing by so doing; for they would not admit them to freedom till after a certain period of years, during which I contend that the value of every individual slave would have been reimbursed to them from the increased income of their estates.  Mr. Steele, as we have seen, more than tripled the value of his income during his experiment:  I believe that he more than quadrupled it; for he says, that he more than tripled it besides increasing his stock, and laying out large sums annually in