had been expelled from that society for domestic unfaithfulness; but he was happy to say that he had not heard of a single instance of expulsion for this cause during the year then ended.  Much inconvenience is felt on account of the Moravian and Wesleyan missionaries being prohibited from performing the marriage service, even for their own people.  Efforts are now making to obtain the repeal of the law which makes marriages performed by sectarians (as all save the established church are called) void.

[Footnote A:  What a resurrection to domestic life was that, when long severed families flocked from the four corners of the island to meet their kindred members!  And what a glorious resurrection will that be in our own country, when the millions of emancipated beings scattered over the west and south, shall seek the embraces of parental and fraternal and conjugal love.]

That form of licentiousness which appears among the higher classes in every slaveholding country, abounded in Antigua during the reign of slavery.  It has yielded its redundant fruits in a population of four thousand colored people; double the number of whites.  The planters, with but few exceptions, were unmarried and licentious.  Nor was this vice confined to the unmarried.  Men with large families, kept one or more mistresses without any effort at concealment.  We were told of an “Honorable” gentleman, who had his English wife and two concubines, a colored and a black one.  The governor himself stated as an apology for the prevalence of licentiousness among the slaves, that the example was set them constantly by their masters, and it was not to be wondered at if they copied after their superiors.  But it is now plain that concubinage among the whites is nearly at an end.  An unguarded statement of a public man revealed the conviction which exists among his class that concubinage must soon cease.  He said that the present race of colored people could not be received into the society of the whites, because of illegitimacy; but the next generation would be fit associates for the whites, because they would be chiefly born in wedlock.

The uniform testimony respecting intemperance was, that it never had been one of the vices of the negroes.  Several planters declared that they had rarely seen a black person intoxicated.  The report of the Wesleyan missionaries already referred to, says, “Intemperance is most uncommon among the rural negroes.  Many have joined the Temperance Society, and many act on tee-total principles.”  The only colored person (either black or brown) whom we saw drunk during a residence of nine weeks in Antigua, was a carpenter in St. John’s, who as he reeled by, stared in our faces and mumbled out his sentence of condemnation against wine bibbers, “—­Gemmen—­you sees I’se a little bit drunk, but ’pon honor I only took th—­th-ree bottles of wine—­that’s all.”  It was “Christmas times,” and doubtless the poor man thought he would venture for once in the year to copy the example of the whites.