The law of Louisiana stipulates that a slave shall have _one_ linen shirt,[K] and a pair of pantaloons for the summer, and _one_ linen shirt and a woollen great-coat and pantaloons for the winter; and for food, one pint of salt, and a barrel of Indian corn, rice, or beans, every month. In North Carolina, the law decides that a quart of corn per day is sufficient. But, if the slave does not receive this poor allowance, who can _prove_ the fact. The withholding of proper sustenance is absolutely incapable of proof, unless the evidence of the sufferer himself be allowed; and the law, as if determined to obstruct the administration of justice, permits the master to exculpate himself by an oath that the charges against him are false. Clothing may, indeed, be ascertained by _inspection_; but who is likely to involve himself in quarrels with a white master because a poor negro receives a few rags less than the law provides? I apprehend that a person notorious for such gratuitous acts of kindness, would have little peace or safety, in any slaveholding country. [Footnote K: This shirt is usually made of a coarse kind of bagging.] If a negro be compelled to toil night and day, (as it is said they sometimes are,[L] at the season of sugar-making) who is to _prove_ that he works more than his fourteen or fifteen hours? No slave can be a witness for himself, or for his fellow-slaves; and should a white man happen to know the fact, there are ninety-nine chances out of a hundred, that he will deem it prudent to be silent. And here I would remark that even in the island of Jamaica, where the laws have given a most shocking license to cruelty,--even in Jamaica, the slave is compelled to work but _ten_ hours a day, beside having many holidays allowed him. In Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and New-Jersey, the _convicts_ condemned to hard labor in the penitentiaries, are required by law to toil only from _eight_ to _ten_ hours a day, according to the season of the year; yet the law providing that the innocent slave should labor but _fourteen_ or _fifteen_ hours a day, professes to have been made as a merciful amelioration of his lot!--In Rome, the slaves had a yearly festival called the Saturnalia, during which they were released from toil, changed places with their masters, and indulged in unbounded merriment; at first it lasted but one day; but its duration afterwards extended to two, three, four, and five days in succession. We have no Saturnalia here--unless we choose thus to designate a coffle of slaves, on the fourth of July, rattling their chains to the sound of a violin, and carrying the banner of freedom in hands loaded with irons. [Footnote L: See Western Review, No. 2, on the Agriculture of Louisiana.]