“The number of marriages in the six parishes of the island, in the year 1835, the first entire year of freedom, was 476; all of which, excepting about 50, were between persons formerly slaves.  The total number of marriages between slaves solemnized in the Church during the nine years ending December 31, 1832, was 157; in 1833, the last entire year of slavery, it was 61.”

Thus it appears that the whole number of marriages during ten years previous to emancipation (by far the most favorable ten years that could have been selected) was but half as great as the number for a single year following emancipation!

The Governor, in one of our earliest interviews with him, said, “the great crime of this island, as indeed of all the West India Colonies, has been licentiousness, but we are certainly fast improving in this particular.”  An aged Christian, who has spent many years in the island, and is now actively engaged in superintending several day schools for the negro children, informed us that there was not one third as much concubinage as formerly.  This he said was owing mainly to the greater frequency of marriages, and the cessation of late night work on the estates, and in the boiling houses, by which the females were constantly exposed during slavery.  Now they may all be in their houses by dark.  Formerly the mothers were the betrayers of their daughters, encouraging them to form unhallowed connections, and even selling them to licentious white and colored men, for their own gain.  Now they were using great strictness to preserve the chastity of their daughters.

A worthy planter, who has been in the island since 1800, stated, that it used to be a common practice for mothers to sell their daughters to the highest bidder!—­generally a manager or overseer.  “But now;” said he, “the mothers hold their daughters up for marriage, and take pains to let every body know that their virtue is not to be bought and sold any longer.”  He also stated that those who live unmarried now are uniformly neglected and suffer great deprivations.  Faithfulness after marriage, exists also to a greater extent than could have been expected from the utter looseness to which they had been previously accustomed, and with their ignorance of the nature and obligations of the marriage relation.  We were informed both by the missionaries and the planters, that every year and month they are becoming more constant, as husband and wife, more faithful as parents, and more dutiful as children.  One planter said that out of a number who left his employ after 1834, nearly all had companions on other estates, and left for the purpose of being with them.  He was also of the opinion that the greater proportion of changes of residence among the emancipated which took place at that time, were owing to the same cause.[A] In an address before the Friendly Society in St. John’s, the Archdeacon stated that during the previous year (1835) several individuals