Precisely similar is the testimony of private correspondents and of the public press so far as we have been able to learn, in all the other colonies where emancipation has taken place.  There is certainly nothing in all this that indicates a disposition on the part of the emancipated to throw off the employment of their former masters, but much the reverse.  We may safely challenge contradiction to the assertion, that at the expiration of the jubilee there were not a set of free laborers on earth from whom the West India planters could have got more work for the same money.  It may be proper in these days, when the maxims of slavery have so fearfully overshadowed the rights of man, to say that a man has a right to forbear laboring when he can live honestly without it—­or, at all events, he has a right to choose whether he will employ himself or be employed by another.  Hence it may turn out that the refusal to labor, so far as there has been any, only serves to prove the more clearly the fitness of the laborers of freedom.

WAGES

It must have been obvious to every man of reflection that in a change so vast, involving so many laborers, and in circumstances so various, there would arise almost infinite disputes about the rate of wages.  The colonies differ widely as to the real value of labor.  Some have a rich, unexhausted, and, perhaps, inexhaustible soil, and a scanty supply of laborers.  Others are more populous and less fertile.  The former would of course offer higher wages than the latter, for so sudden was the step there could be no common understanding on the point.  Again, as we have seen, the planters came into the measure with different views.  Some anticipated the general change, and either from motives of humanity or policy, or more probably of both, adopted a course calculated to gain the gratitude and good will of the laborer.—­These would offer wages which the less liberal would call ruinous.  Many, and it would seem the great body of them in Jamaica, yielded unwillingly to superior power.  They saw the sceptre of despotic authority was to be wrested from their grasp.  They threw it down, as one may easily believe, resolved to seize the best substitute they could.  They would infallibly fall upon the plan of getting the greatest possible amount of work for the least possible amount of pay.  When we consider that even in the oldest, most civilized, and most Christianized free-labor communities, employers are wont to combine to keep down the rate of wages, while on the other hand the laborers throw up work to raise it, we shall not be surprised that there should be things of this sort in Jamaica, liberty being in the gristle.  The only help for such an evil is, that there is always a rate of wages which is advantageous to both parties, and things being left to themselves, it will at last be found.