246
ANTIGUA.
some correction of the tread-wheel in Port of Spain. This mode of managing them might succeed; in Antigua or in any of the old colonies, where all the soil is appropriated, these free savages can never be anything else but a source of unmingled evil to the whole society. In Trinidad they may at least be kept from doing harm, and in whatever degree they might be induced to labor, the effect of their industry would be directly beneficial to the island. The plan is summary, and the requisitions peremptory; but so it must of necessity be with subjects who (with all due reverence to the human face divine be it spoken !) are not more docile or reflecting than some of the beasts that perish. To talk of dealing with these men in all the circuitous processes of mature civilization, is foolishness beyond all other foolishness; it would not be in the least more absurd to commence a child's arithmetic, by attempting to teach him circulating decimals before he could repeat the multiplication table. I am in my conscience firmly persuaded, that the most exact justice and the greatest mercy we can show towards those benighted beings, will consist in chalking out for them a path in which they are to walk, and uniformly to restrain them from wandering out of it. I am speaking now of the adults only, for although I set no bounds to the possible improvement in the characters of grown per-