It was common for the planters of Barbadoes, like those of Antigua, to declare that the greatest blessing of abolition to them, was that it relieved them from the disagreeable work of flogging the negroes.  We had the unsolicited testimony of a planter, that slave mothers frequently poisoned, and otherwise murdered, their young infants, to rid them of a life of slavery.  What a horrible comment this upon the cruelties of slavery!  Scarce has the mother given birth to her child, when she becomes its murderer.  The slave-mother’s joy begins, not like that of other mothers, when “a man is born into the world,” but when her infant is hurried out of existence, and its first faint cry is hushed in the silence of death!  Why this perversion of nature?  Ah, that mother knows the agonies, the torments, the wasting woes, of a life of slavery, and by the bowels of a mother’s love, and the yearnings of a mother’s pity, she resolves that her babe shall never know the same.  O, estimate who can, how many groans have gone up from the cane field, from the boiling-house, from around the wind mill, from the bye paths, from the shade of every tree, from the recesses of every dungeon!

Colonel Barrow, of Edgecome estate, declared, that the habit of flogging was so strong among the overseers and book-keepers, that even now they frequently indulge it in the face of penalties and at the risk of forfeiting their place.

The descriptions which the special magistrates give of the lower class of overseers and the managers of the petty estates, furnish data enough for judging of the manner in which they would be likely to act when clothed with arbitrary power.  They are “a low order of men,” “without education,” “trained up to use the whip,” “knowing nothing else save the art of flogging,” “ready at any time to perjure themselves in any matter where a negro is concerned,” &c.  Now, may we not ask what but cruelty, the most monstrous, could be expected under a system where such men were constituted law makers, judges, and executioners?

From the foregoing facts, and the still stronger circumstantial evidence, we leave the reader to judge for himself as to the amount of cruelty attendant upon “the reign of terror,” in Barbadoes.  We must, however, mention one qualification, without which a wrong impression may be made.  It has already been remarked that Barbadoes has, more than any other island, reduced slave labor and sugar cultivation to a regular system.  This the planters have been compelled to do from the denseness of their population, the smallness of their territory, the fact that the land was all occupied, and still more, because the island, from long continued cultivation, was partly worn out.  A prominent feature in their system was, theoretically at least, good bodily treatment of the slaves, good feeding, attention to mothers, to pregnant women, and to children, in order that the estates might always be kept well stocked with