for the express purpose of preventing barbarities of a similar nature, and a fine of £.500 currency, together with six months imprisonment, had been annexed as the punishment of such offences. But so little were the enactments of law in unison with the general feelings of the bulk of the people, that even after this statute had been passed, not only did a jury doubt whether the most wanton barbarity towards an infant, by its owner, was liable to any punishment; but the idea of calling a Master to account for this ill-treatment of one of his own Slaves created a popular ferment, and a violent cry against the prosecutors of the delinquent, and was resented as a gross and novel infraction of the rights and privileges of ownership. This very Herbert afterwards brought his action against the Provost Marshal, for having taken the poor unoffending boy into his custody, partly that the child might be forth-coming, partly to save him from the violence of his brutal Master. The Provost Marshal, after a long course of judicial proceeding, would have had heavy penalties to pay, had he not got off on a point of law. Herbert was considered as a persecuted man, and became a highly popular character in the community. But that which renders this incident most of all worthy of remark, is, that unsatisfactory as the issue might appear to us to have been, a detailed account of it, with some other instances too much in the same spirit, was sent over to the Privy Council, by the Council and Assembly of the island, with some apparent satisfaction, as a proof of the protection enjoyed by the Slaves against immoderate punishment or cruelty on the part of their Masters. Not to insist in this place on the impossibility of enforcing any laws which may be enacted for the protection and comfort of Slaves, a topic on which I may have occasion to say more hereafter, law and slavery are, in their own nature, absolutely and universally incompatible. The Slave’s best protection must ever be found in his Master’s kindness, especially where kindness is combined with affluence; and, by giving to the Slaves a nominal right to definite legal privileges, you only infuse a spirit of discontent into them, and a spirit of suspicion and resentment into their Masters; at least, until the absolute nullity of the law be clearly manifest to both parties. The Master has not the same motives for tenderness, (motives ever powerful in a generous mind) as when all right, all rivalship are excluded, and he knows that his Slaves are given up completely into his power; that they are entirely dependent on his will, and that they must receive every favour as flowing altogether from his spontaneous beneficence. It is not therefore going too far, to affirm, that by destroying, or at least impairing, the force of these feelings, you do the Slave more harm, than can be compensated by any benefit he can derive from the laws. [Sidenote: Considered in the view of its degrading effects.]