JAMAICA.
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tem Is efficient for the purposes of perpetuating the en slaving influence of terror, and rendering owners and overseers independent of the law of kindness and jus tice. Many of the treadmills, as we have shewn, are instruments not of punishment but of torture. From their construction, they are not capable of their legiti mate object, the enforcement of a species of severe labor. The prisoners are put upon them for one or two short spells in the day, for the sole purposes of torture, and to diversify the horrors of the dark cell, and the chain gang. Another feature of the workhouse discipline, is its demoralising tendency, which is as complete as if it had been devised for the purpose. The prisoners of both sexes, of all ages, and for all of fences, are thrown together indiscriminately. At night the males are crowded into one sleeping room, and the females into another, their security being sometimes ensured by shackles. Of the temporary inmates of the workhouses, thus associated together, besides young persons of both sexes, a fair proportion are members of churches, individuals of irreproachable conversation, who are sent for offences occasioned by accident, in ability, or sickness ; or for those of a fictitious and constructive nature, which, if true, fix no stain on their moral character, though they are thus visited by pun ishments, implying the deepest moral degradation. The forfeiture of time to the estates, is the last mode of punishment, which our brief summary enables us to allude to. It is one which involves as much irri tation and suffering as all others combined, from the circumstance, of its reducing the negros to absolute destitution. The law has given the master a direct interest in convicting his negros of crime, by affixing a penalty, which gives him their labor without pay-