282 Ow Colonies. [[Sept. 



that code, " the provisions are as despotic as those of any slave system 

 that can be conceived. The labourer may almost be considered as 

 adscriptus gleba: ; he is deemed a vagabond, and liable to punishment if 

 he ventures to move from his dwelling or farm, without license ; he is 

 prohibited from keeping a shop ; no person can build a house in the coun- 

 try unconnected with a farm. Deviations from the law are punished by 

 fine and imprisonment. The code determines the method of managing 

 landed property ; of forming contracts for cultivation between proprietor 

 and farmer, farmer and labourer ; of regulating gi-azing establishments ; 

 the rural police or the inspection of the cultivation and cultivators ; of 

 repressing vagrancy ; and of the repair and maintenance of the public 

 roads. Lastly, it affixes the penalty of fine in some cases, and in others 

 of indefinite imprisonment, at the option of the judge of the peace." 

 Let the spirit of this be-praised law, be compared with that which the 

 legislature of Jamaica proposed for the protection and amelioration of the 

 slaves in that island, and let the state of the agricultural population of 

 the one be compared with that of the other, and the British colonists 

 need ask no other justice to be done to them. All that they can do 

 with respect to compulsory labour, they have done. It is indispensable 

 that they should prevent the punishment which wilful and obstinate 

 idleness justly provokes, from being inflicted wantonly or degenerating 

 into cruelty. If the disallowed act has failed in this respect it is defec- 

 tive ; if it has guarded it with the best cautions and restrictions that can, 

 under the circumstances, be devised, surely it ought to be exempt from 

 the insulting and undeserved reproaches' it has encountered. The pro- 

 posed act limits the punishment of a slave at any one time, or for any 

 one offence, or until he has recovered from any former punishment, to 

 thirty-nine lashes if they be inflicted in the presence of the owner, and 

 to ten lashes in his absence. In order to obviate the possibility of any 

 cruelty being practised with impunity on the slaves, it enacts also that 

 in case any owner, or others by their direction, shall mutilate or dis- 

 member, or wantonly or cruelly whip, maltreat, beat, bruise, wound, or 

 imprison, or keep in confinement without sufficient support, or brand 

 any slave or slaves, the off"ender shall be subject to a fine not exceeding 

 £'100, and imprisonment not exceeding twelve months, and the slave 

 freed at the discretion of the court before whom the same shall be tried ; 

 and all provisions are added for facilitating such trials, for doing effiectual 

 justice on the offenders, and for giving to the injured slave such com- 

 pensation, as the case may admit of. 



The tenth section proposes to abolish the corporal punishment of fe- 

 males. That it " were a consummation devoutly to be wished" every 

 man will agree, and the only reason which can be offered against the 

 abolition is that which is furnished by the resolutions of the House of 

 Assembly, which, as they cannot be stated in more temperate and be- 

 coming language, we take leave to quote. " Until negro women have 

 acquired more of the sense of shame that distinguishes European fe- 

 males, it will be impossible, with respect to them, to lay aside altogether 

 punishment by flogging, there being no substitute that promises to be 

 accompanied with the same salutary dread." 



The abandonment of the whip, either as an emblem of authority or as 

 a stimulus to labour, which the eleventh section recommends, is in the 

 present condition of the slaves pronounced, by those who are best ac- 

 quainted with their habits, to be impracticable. That such will be the 



