gracious.  Now you must not suppose that these same Irish free labourers and negro slaves will be permitted to work together at this Brunswick Canal.  They say that this would be utterly impossible; for why?—­there would be tumults, and risings, and broken heads, and bloody bones, and all the natural results of Irish intercommunion with their fellow creatures, no doubt—­perhaps even a little more riot and violence than merely comports with their usual habits of Milesian good fellowship; for, say the masters, the Irish hate the negroes more even than the Americans do, and there would be no bound to their murderous animosity if they were brought in contact with them on the same portion of the works of the Brunswick Canal.  Doubtless there is some truth in this—­the Irish labourers who might come hither, would be apt enough, according to a universal moral law, to visit upon others the injuries they had received from others.  They have been oppressed enough themselves, to be oppressive whenever they have a chance; and the despised and degraded condition of the blacks, presenting to them a very ugly resemblance of their own home, circumstances naturally excite in them the exercise of the disgust and contempt of which they themselves are very habitually the objects; and that such circular distribution of wrongs may not only be pleasant, but have something like the air of retributive right to very ignorant folks, is not much to be wondered at.  Certain is the fact, however, that the worst of all tyrants is the one who has been a slave; and for that matter (and I wonder if the southern slaveholders hear it with the same ear that I do, and ponder it with the same mind?) the command of one slave to another is altogether the most uncompromising utterance of insolent truculent despotism that it ever fell to my lot to witness or listen to.  ’You nigger—­I say, you black nigger,—­you no hear me call you—­what for you no run quick?’ All this, dear E——­, is certainly reasonably in favour of division of labour on the Brunswick Canal; but the Irish are not only quarrelers, and rioters, and fighters, and drinkers, and despisers of niggers—­they are a passionate, impulsive, warm-hearted, generous people, much given to powerful indignations, which break out suddenly when they are not compelled to smoulder sullenly—­pestilent sympathisers too, and with a sufficient dose of American atmospheric air in their lungs, properly mixed with a right proportion of ardent spirits, there is no saying but what they might actually take to sympathy with the slaves, and I leave you to judge of the possible consequences.  You perceive, I am sure, that they can by no means be allowed to work together on the Brunswick Canal.

I have been taking my daily walk round the island, and visited the sugar mill and the threshing mill again.