280 EIGHTS Of SLAVES. 



when the high price of the produce gave a hope of extraor- 

 dinary profit. It would, however, be unjust not to acknow- 

 ledge in this struggle between private interests and the 

 views of wise policy, the desires and the principles mani- 

 fested by some inhabitants of the island of Cuba, either in 

 their own name or in the name of some rich and powerful 

 corporations. "The humanity of our legislation," says M. 

 d'Arango nobly,* in a memoir written in 1796, " grants the 

 slave four rights (quatro consuelos), which somewhat assuage 

 his sufferings, and which have always been refused him by a 

 foreign policy. These rights are, the choice of a master lesa 

 severe ;t the privilege of marrying according to his own 

 inclination ; the possibility of purchasing his liberty]: by his 

 labour, and of paying, with an acquired property, for the 

 liberty of his wife and children. Notwithstanding the 

 wisdom and mildness of Spanish legislation, to how many 



* Informe sobre negros fugitivos (de 9 de Junio de 1769), por 

 Don Francisco de Aranyo y Pareno, Oidor honorario y syndico del 

 Consnlado. 



f The right of buscar amo. When a slave has found a new master 

 who will purchase him, he may quit the master of whom he has to com- 

 plain j such is the sense and spirit of a law, beneficent, though often eluded, 

 as are all the laws that protect the slaves. In the hope of enjoying the 

 privilege of buscar amo, the blacks often address to the travellers they 

 meet, a question, which in civilized Europe, where a vote or an opinion is 

 sometimes sold, is more equivocally expressed ; Quiere Vm. comprarme ? 

 [Will you buy me, Sir ?] 



% A slave in the Spanish colonies ought, according to law, to be 

 estimated at the lowest price ; this estimate, at the time of my journey, 

 was, according to the locality, from 200 to 380 piastres. In 1825, the 

 price of an adult negro, at the island of Cuba, was 450 piastres. In 1788, 

 the French trade furnished a negro for 280 to 300 piastres. A slave, 

 among the Greeks, cost 300 to 600 drachmes (54 to 1 08 piastres), when 

 the day-labourer was paid one -tenth of a piastre. While the Spanish 

 laws and institutions favour manumission in every way, the master, in the 

 other islands, pays the fiscal, for every freed slave, five to seven hundred 

 piastres ! 



What a contrast is observable between the humanity of the most 

 ancient Spanish laws concerning slavery, and the traces of barbarism found 

 in every page of the Black Code, and in some of the provincial laws of the 

 English islands! The laws of Barbadoes, made in 1686, and those of 

 Bermuda, in 1730, decreed that the master who killed his negro in chas- 

 tising him, could n>t even be sued, while the master who killed his slave 

 wilfully, should pay ten pounds sterling to the royal treasury. A law of 

 Saint Christopher's, of March llth, 1784, beg'ins with these words: 



