PROCEEDINGS OF THE SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES OF LONDON. 431 



proscription of race, are under political and social disabilities, and 

 looked upon as outcasts; in fact, as a nuisance, of which the 

 commonwealth ought to get rid. In our own colonies the antipathy 

 of race is as strong as in America ; but social and political proscrip- 

 tion are not carried to the same length, and the freedman is more his 

 own master. 



Notwithstanding their emancipation, the Africans of our colonies, 

 instead of increasing rapidly, like the bondsmen in America, increase 

 very little, if at all. Their numbers are, in fact, understood to be 

 kept down, not from want of the means of subsistence, but by a pro- 

 miscuous intercourse of the sexes, by infanticide with corresponding 

 vices, and the neglect of children. In 1833, the period of slave 

 emancipation in our colonies, the total number of the slaves of our 

 principal colony (Jamaica) was 310,000 ; and by census taken in 

 1844 the free negro population had fallen to 196,000, a decline of 37 

 per cent. A contrast to this is the rapid increase of the slave popu- 

 lation of the United States of America. In 1850 its total amount 

 was 3,200,000, and by the last decennial census it was, in round 

 numbers, 4,000,000, an increase of 25 per cent. In one of the 

 greatest and, perhaps, the very finest island of the Antilles, the 

 African negroes have been their own masters for half a century. 

 Notwithstanding these advantages, and a free and independent inter- 

 course with the civilized nations of Europe, the success of the 

 experiment has not been remarkable. In the comparatively short 

 period which has elapsed Hayti has had many revolutions, the 

 Government oscillating between a republic and an empire, in humble 

 mimicry of the great nation whose yoke they threw off. The sensual 

 vices would seem to prevail in Hayti as among the emancipated 

 negroes of the British colonies, and the result is that increase of 

 population has been stayed, as in these. A census of the population 

 of Hayti in 1821, seven years after the people had become their own 

 entire masters, gave a population of 235,000, and the present num- 

 ber by estimate is thought not to exceed 250,000, a miserable increase 

 in forty long years of no more than between one and two per cent. 

 The facility with which the African negroes submit to slavery, even 

 their contenteduess, nay their cheerfulness in servitude, seems iar 

 to exceed that of any other race of man. This temper is evinced 

 not only in their own country and abroad under foreign masters, 

 but even under masters less civilized than themselves. Thus, at 

 present some of the tribes of Eed Indians who have made some 



