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JAMAICA.
of the island. The planters have also perpetuated their irresponsible authority, by the exercise of indirect powers of coercion, in withholding the slave allowances ; destroying the goats, poultry and hogs of the appren tices; pulling down their houses; taking away the watchmen from the provision grounds, and suffering them to be destroyed by the trespass of cattle ; taking away the field cooks ; locking up the sick in the hos pitals, and other acts of cruelty and oppression, against which the apprentices have no protection. The amount of suffering and punishment inflicted in these modes, is placed on no record, reported to no authority, but it is not therefore less oppressively and keenly felt. It affords us little satisfaction to turn from illegal to legal oppression. A limited and imperfect idea of the amount of punish ment inflicted by the Special Magistrates, may be learned from the fact, that during the first two years of their administration in the colony, sixty thousand appren tices were punished to an extent, in the aggregate, of a quarter of a million of lashes, and fifty thousand other punishments, by the treadmill, chain gang, solitary confinement, and mulcts of time. We would repeat here the remark, that we have neither the power nor the wish to institute a comparison between the present and former system. To do this would require an unenvi able faculty of imagination, or a personal acquaintance with slavery, during which, the mind should have be come familial-, without becoming reconciled, with its scenes of violence and wretchedness. We are not therefore in a condition to state how much the negro has gained by the substitution of the Special Magis trate for the negro driver, and of the discipline of the parish workhouse, for the stocks and bilboes of the plantation ; but we can and do assert, that the new sys-