260
JAMAICA.
lars are clothed, and in a great measure fed by their kind patroness, the lady of H. M. S C O T T . It is a rule that all shall labor during certain hours, when some of the elder children turn out into the field with their little hbes, and others go into the carpenter's shop. Tlie little ones are employed to pick stones off the ground or to carry cedar shingles. The girls of suit able age remain in school to learn needlework. They work with the same cheerfulness with which they learn. This is the first instance we have met with of free children working on an estate ; for not only do the free children of the apprentices on Hopeton and Lenox thus apply themselves to labor, but the free children from a neighbouring estate and even the children of free parents. On these estates the evils of slavery have, we believe, been mitigated to a greater extent, than on any others in Jamaica, and that not only by in creasing the comforts of the negros, but by an anxious attention to their moral and religious welfare. Every ameliorating provision in the Abolition Act was in troduced many years before 1834, and the introduc tion of the apprenticeship involved no change of sys tem. Night work during crop had long been abolished, and the allowances of food and clothing were on the most liberal scale. The conduct of the Hopeton family towards their slaves has been marked by its disinte restedness. The proprietor voluntarily relinquished those forced methods of cultivation, which have, proved so destructive of human life on other sugai^ estates. With what success, his system, so opposite to that generally adopted, has been pursued, may be imperfectly learned from the tables of the increase and decrease of population on the Hopeton and, Lenox estates. In 181/, there were two hundred and ninety-