“There is great reason to expect that many Jamaica proprietors will anticipate the period established by the Slavery Abolition Act for the termination of the apprenticeship.  They will, as an act of grace, and with a view to their future arrangements with their negroes, terminate the apprenticeship either of all at once, or by giving immediate freedom to the most deserving; try the effect of this gift, and of the example afforded to the apprentices when they see those who have been discharged from the apprenticeship working on the estates for wages.  If such a course is adopted, it will afford an additional motive for inducing the Legislature to consider whether the good feeling of the laboring population, and their future connection with their former employers, may not be promoted by permitting them to owe to the grace of their own Legislature the termination of the apprenticeship as soon as the requisite legislation for the new state of things has been adopted.”—­Jamaica Despatch.

Of such sort as this is the testimony from all the Colonies, most abundantly published in the Emancipator and other abolition papers, to the point of the safety of entire Emancipation.  At the time when the step was taken, it was universally concluded that so far from being dangerous it promised the greatest safety.  It would not only put an end to the danger apprehended from the foreign interference of the abolitionists, but it would conciliate the negroes!  And we are not able to find any one who professes to be disappointed with the result thus far.  The only evil now complained of, is the new freemen do not in some instances choose to work on the terms offered by the planters.  They have shed no man’s blood.  They have committed no depredation.  They peaceably obey the laws.  All this, up to the latest date, is universally admitted.  Neither does any one now presume to prophesy anything different for the future.

INDUSTRY.

On the one topic of the industry of the Emancipated people, the West Indian papers give the most conflicting accounts.  Some represent them as laboring with alacrity, diligence and effect wherever anything like an adequate compensation is offered.  It is asserted by some, and not denied by any authorities that we have seen, that the emancipated are industriously at work on those estates where the masters voluntarily relinquished the apprenticeship before the first of August and met their freed people in good faith.  But most of the papers, especially in Jamaica, complain grievously that the freed people will work on no reasonable terms.  We give a fair specimen from one of the Jamaica papers, on which our political editors choose most to rely for their information:—­