Another insurrectionary feature peculiar to the apprenticeship is its making the apprentices free a portion of the time.  One fourth of the time is given them every week—­just enough to afford them a taste of the sweets of liberty, and render them dissatisfied with their condition.  Then the manner in which this time is divided is calculated to irritate.  After being a slave nine hours, the apprentice is made a freeman for the remainder of the day; early the next morning the halter is again put on, and he treads the wheel another day.  Thus the week wears away until Saturday; which is an entire day of freedom.  The negro goes out and works for his master, or any one else, as he pleases, and at night he receives his quarter of a dollar.  This is something like freedom, and he begins to have the feelings of a freeman—­a lighter heart and more active limbs.  He puts his money carefully away at night, and lays himself down to rest his toil-worn body.  He awakes on Sabbath morning, and is still free.  He puts on his best clothes, goes to church, worships a free God, contemplates a free heaven, sees his free children about him, and his wedded wife; and ere the night again returns, the consciousness that he is a slave is quite lost in the thoughts of liberty which fill his breast, and the associations of freedom which cluster around him.  He sleeps again. Monday morning he is startled from his dreams by the old “shell-blow” of slavery, and he arises to endure another week of toil, alternated by the same tantalizing mockeries of freedom.  Is not this applying the hot iron to the nerve?

5.  But, lastly, the apprenticeship system, as if it would apply the match to this magazine of combustibles, holds out the reward of liberty to every apprentice who shall by any means provoke his master to punish him a second time.

[NOTE.—­In a former part of this work—­the report of Antigua—­we mentioned having received information respecting a number of the apprenticeship islands, viz., Dominica, St. Christopher’s, Nevis, Montserrat, Anguilla, and Tortola, from the Wesleyan Missionaries whom we providentially met with at the annual district meeting in Antigua.  We designed to give the statements of these men at some length in this connection, but we find that it would swell our report to too great a size.  It only remains to say, therefore, in a word, that the same things are generally true of those colonies which have been detailed in the account of Barbadoes.  There is the same peaceableness, subordination, industry, and patient suffering on the part of the apprentices, the same inefficiency of the apprenticeship as a preparation for freedom, and the same conviction in the community that the people will, if at all affected by it, be less fit for emancipation in 1840 than they were in 1834.  A short call at St. Christopher’s confirmed these views in our minds, so far as that island is concerned.