WASTE OF LABOR. 



129 



This is but one of the thousand ways in which labor is 

 squandered on this island. In the sugar mills, from twenty 

 to thirty men and women will be employed to do what five 

 American operatives would do much better in the same 

 time, with the aid of such labor-saving agencies as would 

 suggest themselves at once to an intelligent mind. Every- 

 thing is done in a way rather to increase than diminish the 

 number of hands required. I venture to say, that there is 

 not one single step in the manufacture of a hogshead of 

 sugar, or a puncheon of rum, upon any estate in Jamaica, 

 in which any intelligent mechanic might not point out a 

 palpable waste of labor, and a ready process of saving it. 



I could not learn that there were any estates on the 

 island, decently stocked with implements of husbandry. 

 Even the modern axe is not in general use ; for felling the 

 larger class of trees, the negroes commonly use what they 

 call an axe, which is shaped much like a wedge, except 

 that it is a little wider at the edge than at the opposite 

 end, at the very extremity of which, a perfectly straight han- 



letter to Mr. Gladstone: — s< Of course it is easy and plausible to assert, that no man 

 works so well as when working for his own profit — that the hope of raising him- 

 self in the social scale is among the strongest incentives by which the human mind 

 can be actuated— and to point to the English or American laborer as a proof of a 

 somewhat hastily drawn conclusion. But in practice it has invariably been found, 

 that so far from having advanced since the days of the apprenticeship, the negro 

 laborer has on the whole retrograded (vide Lord Grey's despatch, quoted above); 

 that indolence, not industry, has been the result of his freedom ; that the task per" 

 formed by him is not one half of what his strength would enable him to accomp" 

 lish in an easy day's work ; and that for this service, such as it is, he demands a 



PRICE WHICH WOULD BE DEEMED EXORBITANT IN ANY OTHER PART OF THE 

 WORLD." 



6* 



