The English abolitionists have labored long and arduously. Every inch of the ground has been contested. After obtaining the decision that negroes brought into England were freemen, it took them _thirty-five years_ to obtain the abolition of the slave _trade_. But their progress, though slow and difficult, has been certain. The slaves are now emancipated in every British colony; and in effecting this happy change, not one drop of blood has been spilt, nor any property destroyed, except two sheds, called _trash houses_, which were set on fire by some unknown hand. In Antigua and Bermuda, emancipation was unqualified; that is, the slaves at once received the stimulus of wages. In those Islands, there has not been the slightest difficulty. In the other colonies, the slaves were made apprentices, and obliged to work five years more, before they received their freedom, and magistrates decided what proportion of time should be employed for their own benefit. The planters had been so violent in opposition to abolition, and had prophesied such terrible disasters resulting from it, that they felt some anxiety to have their prophecies fulfilled. The abolition act, by some oversight, did not stipulate that while the apprentices worked without wages, they should have all the privileges to which they had been accustomed as slaves. It had been a universal practice for one slave to cook for all the rest, so that their food was ready the moment they left the field; and aged female slaves tended the little children, while their mothers were at work. The planters changed this. Every slave was obliged to go to his cabin, whether distant or near, and cook his own dinner; and the time thus lost must be made up to the masters from the hours set apart for the benefit of the apprentices. The aged slaves were likewise sent into the field to work, while mothers were obliged to toil with infants strapped at their backs. Under these circumstances, the apprentices very naturally refused to work. They said, "We are worse off than when we were slaves; for they have taken away privileges to which we were accustomed in bondage, without paying us the wages of freemen." Still under all these provocations, they offered merely _passive_ resistance. The worst enemies of the cause have not been able to discover that a single life has been lost in the West Indies, or a single plantation destroyed in consequence of emancipation! It is a lamentable proof of the corrupt state of the American press, on the subject of slavery, that the irritating conduct of the West Indian planters has been passed over in total silence, while every effort has been made to represent the _passive_ resistance of the apprentices as some great "raw-head and bloody-bones story."