property of their masters must be injured also.  Forced labour, again, sends many of them to the sick-houses.  Here is, at any rate, a loss of their working time.  But it drives them also occasionally to run away, and sometimes to destroy themselves.  Here again is a loss of their working time and of property into the bargain. Forced labour, then, is one of those striking parts in the West Indian husbandry, in which we see a constant source of loss to those who adopt it; and may we not speak, and yet with truth, as unfavourably of some of the other striking parts in the same system?  What shall we say, first, to that injurious disproportion of the articles of croppage with the wants of the estates, which makes little or no provision of food for the labourers (the very first to be cared for), but leaves these to be fed by articles to be bought three thousand miles off in another country, let the markets there be ever so high, or the prices ever so unfavourable, at the time?  What shall we say, again, to that obstinate and ruinous attachment to old customs, in consequence of which even acknowledged improvements are almost forbidden to be received?  How generally has the introduction of the plough been opposed in the West Indies, though both the historians of Jamaica have recommended the use of it, and though it has been proved that one plough with two sets of horses to relieve each other, would turn up as much land in a day, as one hundred Negroes could with their hoes!  Is not the hoe also continued in earthing up the canes there, when Mr. Botham proved, more than thirty years ago, that two men would do more with the East Indian shovel at that sort of work in a day, than ten Negroes with the former instrument?  So much for unprofitable instruments of husbandry; a few words now on unprofitable modes of employment.  It seems, first, little less than infatuation, to make Negroes carry baskets of dung upon their heads, basket after basket, to the field.  I do not mention this so much as an intolerable hardship upon those who have to perform it, as an improvident waste of strength and time.  Why are not horses, or mules, or oxen, and carts or other vehicles of convenience, used oftener on such occasions?  I may notice also that cruel and most disadvantageous mode of employment of making Negroes collect grass for the cattle, by picking it by the hand blade by blade.  Are no artificial grasses to be found in our islands, and is the existence of the scythe unknown there?  But it is of no use to dwell longer upon this subject.  The whole system is a ruinous one from the beginning to the end.  And from whence does such a system arise?  It has its origin in slavery alone.  It is practised no where but in the land of ignorance and slavery.  Slavery indeed, or rather the despotism which supports slavery, has no compassion, and it is one of its characteristics never to think of sparing the sinews of the wretched