And yet, perhaps, we have used the word “humanity” a little too rashly. Let us hear the testimony of Jacob Omnium, which we extract from his late able letter to Lord John Russell, as to the manner in which our cheap sugar is at present manufactured in Cuba:— “I spent,” says that intelligent witness, “the beginning of this year in Cuba, with a view of ascertaining the preparations which were being made in that island to meet the opening of our markets. To an Englishman coming up from Grenada and Jamaica, the contrast between the paralysed and decayed aspect of the trade of those colonies, and the spirit and activity which your measures had infused into that of the Havannah, was most disheartening. “The town was illuminated when I landed, in consequence of the news of high prices from England. Three splendid trains of De Rosne’s machinery, costing 40,000 dollars each, had just arrived from France, and were in process of erection; steam-engines and engineers were coming over daily from America; new estates were forming; coffee plantations were being broken up; and their feeble gangs of old people and children, who had hitherto been selected for that light work, were formed into task-gangs, and hired out by the month to the new _ingenios_, then in full drive. “It was crop time: the mills went round night and day. On every estate (I scarcely hope to be believed when I state the fact) _every slave was worked under the whip eighteen hours out of the twenty-four_, and, in the boiling houses, from five to six p.m., and from eleven o’clock to midnight, when half the people were concluding their eighteen hours work, the sound of the hellish lash was incessant; indeed, it was necessary to keep the overtasked wretches awake. “The six hours during which they rested they spent locked in a barracoon,—a strong, foul, close sty, where they wallowed without distinction of age or sex. “There was no marrying amongst the slaves on the plantations; breeding was discouraged; _it was cheaper and less troublesome to buy than to breed_. On many estates females were entirely excluded; but an intelligent American planter told me he disapproved of that system; that the men drooped under it; and that he had found the most beneficial effects from the judicious admixture of a proportion of one ‘lively wench’ to five males in a gang of which he had had charge. Religious instruction and medical aid were not carried out generally beyond baptism and vaccination. “Whilst at work the slaves were stimulated by drivers, armed with swords and whips, and protected by magnificent bloodhounds.”