“Government could not be acting fair towards them to assume that the mass of the people of this island would remain in the state of political indifference to which poverty and slavery had reduced them.  They were now free, every man to rise as rapidly as he could; and the day was not very distant when it would be demonstrated by the change of representatives that would be seen in that house.  It did appear to him, that under the pretext of extending the privileges of freemen to the mass of the people of this country, the government was about to deprive them of those privileges, by curtailing the power of the representative Assembly of those very people.  He could not bring himself to admit, with any regard for truth, that the late apprentices could now be oppressed; they were quite alive to their own interests, and were now capable of taking care of themselves.  So long as labor was marketable, so long they could resist oppression, while on the other hand, the proprietor, for his own interest’s sake, would be compelled to deal fairly with them.”

Though it is evidently all important that the same public opinion which has wrested the whip from the master should continue to watch his proceedings as an employer of freemen, there is much truth in the speech of this black representative and alderman of Kingston.  The brutalized and reckless attorneys and managers, may possibly succeed in driving the negroes from the estates by exorbitant rent and low wages.  They may succeed in their effort to buy in property at half its value.  But when they have effected that, they will be totally dependent for the profits of their ill-gotten gains upon the free laboring people.  They may produce what they call idleness now, and a great deal of vexation and suffering.  But land is plenty, and the laborers, if thrust from the estates, will take it up, and become still more independent.  Reasonable wages they will be able to command, and for such they are willing to labor.  The few thousand whites of Jamaica will never be able to establish slavery, or any thing like it, over its 300,000 blacks.

Already they are fain to swallow their prejudice against color.  Mr. Jordon, member for Kingston and “free nigger,” was listened to with respect.  Nay more, his argument was copied into the “Protest” which the legislature proudly flung back in the face of Parliament, along with the abolition of the apprenticeship, in return for Lord Glenelg’s Bill.  Let all in the United States read and ponder it who assert that “the two races cannot live together on term of equality.”

Legislative independence of Jamaica has ever been the pride of her English conquerors.  They have received with joy the colored fellow colonists into an equal participation of their valued liberty, and they were prepared to rejoice at the extension of the constitution to the emancipated blacks.  But the British Government, by a great fault, if not a crime, has, at the moment when all should have been