362
JAMAICA.
cases, brought into angry collision both with overseers \ and medical men. Invalid apprentices are not supplied | with any allowance of food from the estates. ; The condition of the free children, is another im portant feature of the present system. All, who, on the first of August, were under six years of age, were ' declared unconditionally free, but were left liable, (cxiii.) in case of destitution, to be apprenticed by the Special Magistrate, to the owner of their parents, till twenty-one years of age. This was undoubtedly one of the most dangerous parts of the Abolition Bill ; as such an apprenticeship of the rising generation, involved the indefinite continuance of slavery. Through the constancy of the parents, all the attempts to procure the apprenticeship of the children, have been defeated, though at an expense of infant life, and of an amount of suffering to mothers, which cannot be computed. Let it not be forgotten, that the free children are solely dependent on their mothers for support, and that the latter have only one day and a half in the week to cul tivate ground for this purpose ; an insufficient amount of time, which is still further reduced by the frauds of overseers, and the mulcts of Special Magistrates. The evils and the suffering, which spring from this state of things, are becoming daily more aggravated as time advances. Every birth increases the difficulty to the negro mother, of providnig maintenance for her off spring, and of escaping punishment herself. The in jurious consequences to the interests of proprietors, and of the public, from the present position of the was very ill in tho estate's hospital, he found him with his feet in shackles. W e have already mentioned a medical order, entered in a plantation book, as quoted in one of the Speci.al Magistrates' re ports, " that the patients with sore feet should be kept in thestocks.V