The special magistrates also testify that the apprenticeship is no preparation for freedom.  On this subject they are very explicit.

The colored people bear the same testimony.  Not a few, too, affirm, that the tendency of the apprenticeship is to unfit the negroes for freedom, and avow it as their firm persuasion, that the people will be less prepared for liberty at the end of the apprenticeship, than they were at its commencement.  And it is not without reason that they thus speak.  They say, first, that the bickerings and disputes to which the system gives rise between the master and the apprentice, and the arraigning of each other before the special magistrate, are directly calculated to alienate the parties.  The effect of these contentions, kept up for six years, will be to implant deep mutual hostility; and the parties will be a hundred fold more irreconcilable than they were on the abolition of slavery.  Again, they argue that the apprenticeship system is calculated to make the negroes regard law as their foe, and thus it unfits them for freedom.  They reason thus—­the apprentice looks to the magistrate as his judge, his avenger, his protector; he knows nothing of either law or justice except as he sees them exemplified in the decisions of the magistrate.  When, therefore, the magistrate sentences him to punishment, when he knows he was the injured party, he will become disgusted with the very name of justice, and esteem law his greatest enemy.

The neglect of the planters to use the apprenticeship as a preparation for freedom, warrants us in the conclusion, that they do not think any preparation necessary.  But we are not confined to doubtful inferences on this point.  They testify positively—­and not only planters, but all other classes of men likewise—­that the slaves of Barbadoes were fit for entire freedom in 1834, and that they might have been emancipated then with perfect safety.  Whatever may have been the sentiment of the Barbadians relative to the necessity of preparation before the experiment was made, it is clear that now they have no confidence either in the necessity or the practicability of preparatory schemes.

But we cannot close our remarks upon the apprenticeship system without noticing one good end which it has undesignedly accomplished, i.e., the illustration of the good disposition of the colored people.  We firmly believe that if the friends of emancipation had wished to disprove all that has ever been said about the ferocity and revengefulness of the negroes, and at the same time to demonstrate that they possess, in a pre-eminent degree, those other qualities which render them the fit subjects of liberty and law, they could not have done it more triumphantly than it has been done by the apprenticeship. How this has been done may be shown by pointing out several respects in which the apprenticeship has been calculated to try the negro character most severely, and to develop all that was fiery and rebellious in it.